Achieving most goals demands cognitive control, yet people vary widely in their success at meeting these demands. Although motivation is known to be fundamental to determining success at achieving a goal, what determines motivation to perform a given task remains poorly understood. Here, we describe recent efforts toward addressing this question using the expected-value-of-control model, which simulates the process by which people weigh the costs and benefits of exerting mental effort. This model functionally decomposes this cost-benefit analysis and has been used to fill gaps in understanding of the mechanisms of mental effort and to generate novel predictions about the sources of variability in real-world performance. We discuss the opportunities the model provides for formalizing hypotheses about why people vary in their motivation to perform tasks, as well as for understanding limitations in researchers’ ability to test these hypotheses using a given measure of performance.

实现大多数目标需要认知控制，但人们在满足这些需求方面的成功程度差异很大。虽然众所周知动机是决定成功实现目标的基础，但决定执行给定任务的动机的因素仍然知之甚少。在这里，我们描述了最近使用控制预期值模型解决这个问题的努力，该模型模拟了人们权衡施加脑力的成本和收益的过程。该模型在功能上分解了这种成本收益分析，并已被用于填补对脑力劳动机制理解的空白，并生成关于现实世界表现变异来源的新预测。