Apathy is a common but poorly understood condition with a wide societal impact observed in several brain disorders as well as, to some extent, in the normal population. Hence the need for better characterization of the underlying mechanisms. The processes by which individuals decide to attribute physical effort to obtain rewards might be particularly relevant to relate to apathy traits. Here, w...

The physical effort required to seek out and extract a resource is an important consideration for a foraging animal. A second consideration is the variability or risk associated with resource delivery. An intriguing observation from ethological studies is that animals shift their preference from stable to variable food sources under conditions of increased physical effort or falling energetic r...

In everyday life, we have to decide whether it is worth exerting effort to obtain rewards. Effort can be experienced in different domains, with some tasks requiring significant cognitive demand and others being more physically effortful. The motivation to exert effort for reward is highly subjective and varies considerably across the different domains of behaviour. However, very little is known...

OBJECTIVE Whether the dorsal striatum (DS) mediates cognitive control or cognitive effort per se in decision-making is unclear given that these effects are highly correlated. As the cognitive control requirements of a neuropsychological task intensify, cognitive effort increases proportionately. We implemented a task that disentangled cognitive control and cognitive effort to specify the partic...

This paper presents an approach to analyzing a model of networked cyber-physical systems for fault propagation. We present an implementation of a probabilistic logic model, which allows for reasoning via symbolic evaluation as well as numeric evaluation to perform a quantitative fault analysis. Our models are built from a few building blocks, which can be instantiated as standard or high integr...

Motivation is underpinned by cost-benefit valuations where costs-such as physical effort or outcome risk-are subjectively weighed against available rewards. However, in many environments risks pertain not to the variance of outcomes, but to variance in the possible levels of effort required to obtain rewards (effort risks). Moreover, motivation is often guided by the extent to which cognitive-n...

This paper presents a new effort based model for software usability and reports the results of a set of experiments performed to assess the validity of the model. The model is based on the notion that usability is an inverse function of effort. Physical and mental effort are obtained and inferred from logging physical activity and eye tracking. Using the new model, an objective metric of softwa...