Despite decades of research in the fields of judgment and decision-making, social psychology, cognitive psychology, human-machine interaction, behavioral economics, and neuroscience, we still do not know what “cognitive effort” is. The definitions in use are often imprecise and sometimes diametrically opposed. Researchers with different assumptions talk past each other, and many aspects of effort conservation remain untested and difficult to measure. In this article, we explain why effort is so difficult to pin down and why it is important that researchers develop consensus on precise definitions. Next, we describe major “hidden” sources of miscommunication: areas in which researchers disagree in their underlying assumptions about the nature of effort without realizing it. We briefly review a number of methods used to both measure and manipulate the effortfulness of thinking and highlight why they often produce contradictory findings. We conclude by reviewing existing perspectives on cognitive effort and integrating them to suggest a common framework for communicating about effort as a limited cognitive resource.

尽管在判断与决策、社会心理学、认知心理学、人机交互、行为经济学和神经科学等领域进行了数十年的研究，我们仍然不知道什么是“认知努力”。使用的定义常常不精确，有时甚至是截然相反的。持有不同假设的研究人员互相推诿，努力守恒的许多方面仍未经过测试且难以衡量。在本文中，我们解释了为什么努力如此难以确定，以及为什么研究人员就精确定义达成共识很重要。接下来，我们描述了沟通不畅的主要“隐藏”来源：研究人员在没有意识到的情况下对努力本质的基本假设存在分歧。我们简要回顾了一些用于衡量和操纵思维努力程度的方法，并强调了为什么它们经常产生矛盾的结果。最后，我们回顾了关于认知努力的现有观点，并将它们整合起来，提出了一个通用框架，用于将努力作为有限的认知资源进行交流。