Organisms must frequently evaluate the amount of effort to invest in pursuing future rewards. Despite explicit awareness of the potential benefits of cognitive work, individuals vary in their willingness to attempt cognitively demanding tasks, regardless of intellectual ability. Such differences may suggest that the degree to which cognitive effort degrades perceived outcome value is a subjective, rather than objective, process, similar to risk and delay discounting. Although numerous studies suggest the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is important for allowing subjective value estimates to be updated and/or used in cost/benefit decision‐making, the causal role of the OFC in valuations of mental effort has received scant investigation. We therefore trained 24 female Long‐Evans rats on the rodent cognitive effort task (rCET) and assessed performance following temporary bilateral inactivation of the ventrolateral OFC (vlOFC). In the rCET, rats decide at trial outset whether to perform an easy or hard attentional challenge, namely to localize a brief visual stimulus to one of five possible locations. The difficulty of the challenge is determined by the stimulus duration (1.0 vs. 0.2s for easy vs. hard trials respectively), and success on hard trials results in double the sugar pellet rewards. Somewhat surprisingly, inactivations of the vlOFC did not affect rats’ willingness or ability to exert cognitive effort for larger rewards, despite increasing omissions and motor impulsivity on‐task. When considered with previous work, it appears the vlOFC plays a minimal role in cognitive effort allocation specifically, and in valuations of effort more generally.

中文翻译：

---

大鼠认知力的评估并非严格取决于腹外侧眶额叶皮层

有机体必须经常评估为追求未来回报而投入的精力。尽管明确认识到认知工作的潜在好处，但个人在尝试认知要求高的任务上的意愿各不相同，而与智力能力无关。这种差异可能表明，认知努力降低感知结果价值的程度是主观而非客观的过程，类似于风险和延迟贴现。尽管大量研究表明眼眶额叶皮层（OFC）对于允许更新主观价值估算和/或将其用于成本/收益决策很重要，但OFC在评估脑力中的因果作用尚未得到充分研究。因此，我们对24只雌性Long-Evans大鼠进行了啮齿动物认知努力任务（rCET）训练，并评估了双侧腹侧OFC（v10FC）暂时失活后的表现。在rCET中，大鼠在试验开始时就决定是执行简单还是困难的注意力挑战，即将短暂的视觉刺激定位在五个可能的位置之一。挑战的难度取决于刺激的持续时间（分别为简单试验和硬性试验的1.0s和0.2s），而硬试验的成功会使糖丸的奖励增加一倍。令人惊讶的是，尽管疏通和运动冲动的增加，v10FC的失活并未影响大鼠的意愿或为获得更大回报而施加认知努力的能力。考虑到以前的工作，