What is the feeling of effort about?
What is the feeling of effort about?
For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the general feeling of effort. To advance in this direction, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that the feeling of effort is one and the same for both mental and bodily actions. This feeling represents the subjective costs, both mental and physical, of performing a given action. Cost-based approaches have recently become influential for the feeling of mental effort. Here I focus on arguing that our sense of bodily effort does not simply represent physiological processes, but rather represents the subjective costs of a bodily action. Through this paper I discuss the role of the feeling of effort (and affective states more broadly) in action guidance and the sense of agency. I also define efforts themselves in terms of the feeling of effort.
metacognitive feelings, objective effort, opportunity cost, subjective effort, value-based decision-making
Bermúdez, Juan Pablo
39d9048a-d5e0-486c-b1bd-e5c6312c4969
Bermúdez, Juan Pablo
39d9048a-d5e0-486c-b1bd-e5c6312c4969
Abstract
For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the general feeling of effort. To advance in this direction, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that the feeling of effort is one and the same for both mental and bodily actions. This feeling represents the subjective costs, both mental and physical, of performing a given action. Cost-based approaches have recently become influential for the feeling of mental effort. Here I focus on arguing that our sense of bodily effort does not simply represent physiological processes, but rather represents the subjective costs of a bodily action. Through this paper I discuss the role of the feeling of effort (and affective states more broadly) in action guidance and the sense of agency. I also define efforts themselves in terms of the feeling of effort.
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Accepted/In Press date: 20 February 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 21 October 2024
Keywords:
metacognitive feelings, objective effort, opportunity cost, subjective effort, value-based decision-making
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Local EPrints ID: 495379
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/495379
ISSN: 0004-8402
PURE UUID: 6b02f6c0-f58a-4b95-8f47-33703ca77a7f
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Date deposited: 12 Nov 2024 17:36
Last modified: 13 Nov 2024 03:11
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Author:
Juan Pablo Bermúdez
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