3rd Workshop on mental effort

Scope and Goal of the Workshop

We can all feel exhausted after a day of work, even if we have spent it sitting at a desk. The intuitive concept of mental effort pervades virtually all domains of human information processing and has become an indispensable ingredient for general theories of cognition. However, inconsistent use of the term across cognitive sciences, including cognitive psychology, education, human-factors engineering and artificial intelligence, makes it one of the least well-defined theoretical constructs across fields.

A number of recent approaches lay the foundation for a consensus by offering formal accounts of mental effort. Yet, reaching a multifield-wide consensus on the operationalization of mental effort will require crosstalk between different empirical and computational approaches, including symbolic architectures, non-parametric Bayesian statistics and neural networks. The purpose of this two-day workshop is to review and integrate these emerging perspectives.

To achieve this goal, we invited experts in these fields to present an accessible summary of their research and allocate ample time for dialogue and audience participation across a full day of hands-on tutorials, one panel discussion, and a poster session.

Key questions of discussion will include (but are not limited to):

• What are the experimental phenomena that lay a foundation for theories of mental effort?

• What is the common ground in operationalizing mental effort across different domains of cognitive science?

• Which modeling approach(es) is (are) best suited to answer which questions regarding mental effort?

The workshop is specifically designed to attract scholars with expertise in different modeling disciplines.

Schedule

Workshop Day 1, November 21, 2022, Tutorials 

• An Introduction to Biologically-Inspired Neural Network Modeling
  (Randall O’Reilly, University of California, Davis)
• An Introduction to ACT-R
  (Maria Wirzberger, University of Stuttgart)
• Bayesian Models in Brain Science
  (Andra Geana, Brown University)
• Hierarchical Bayesian parameter estimation of the Drift Diffusion Model
  (Michael J. Frank, Brown University)
• Network Dynamic Modeling of Cognitive Control
  (Anastasia Bizyaeva, Princeton University)
• Reinforcement Learning
  (Hanneke den Ouden, Radboud University)

Workshop Day 2, November 22, 2022, Research Talks

• Keynote: Daniel Kahneman (Princeton University)
• Danielle Bassett (University of Pennsylvania)
• Michael Inzlicht (University of Toronto)
• Yuko Munakata (University of California, Davis)
• Amitai Shenhav (Brown University)

Important Dates  

• Registration & Submission of Poster Abstracts: August 26, 2022
• Workshop Day 1 (Tutorials): November 21, 2022
• Workshop Day 2 (Research Talks): November 22, 2022

Call for abstracts and registration

Are you working on a project or thesis related to mental effort and want to discuss your ideas? If so, we are inviting you to present a poster during our virtual poster session.
To apply, please submit an abstract (2.000 characters) as a part of the registration form.

Contact Details:

• Twitter: @EffortMental
• E-mail contact: mental.effort.meeting@gmail.com
• Organizers: Sebastian Musslick, Maria Wirzberger, Ivan Grahek, Laura Bustamante