The benefit of choice on task performance: Reduced difficulty effects in free-choice versus forced-choice tasks

We investigated how self-determined (free) versus imposed (forced) choices influence task performance. To this end, we examined how changes in perceptual and central decision-processing difficulties affect task performance in an environment where free-choice and forced-choice tasks were intermixed. In Experiments 1 (N = 43) and 2 (N = 42), perceptual processing difficulty was varied by altering colored dot proportions (easy vs. hard color discrimination task). In Experiment 3 (N = 58), decision-processing difficulty was adjusted by changing the rotation degree of letters (easy vs. hard letter rotation task). Across all experiments, both free-choice and forced-choice performance were more impaired with harder stimuli, but this effect was generally less pronounced in freely chosen tasks. Specifically, this was evident from significant interactions between processing mode (free vs. forced) and difficulty (easy vs. hard) in the mean reaction times (RTs) for the tasks with the difficulty manipulation. Thus, processing in free-choice tasks is generally less affected by environmental changes (i.e., variation in information difficulties). We discuss how the benefit of self-determined choices over imposed choices can be explained by motivational and performance-optimization accounts, while also considering the finding that participants adjusted their task choices toward tasks with easier stimuli (i.e., significant main effect of task difficulty on choosing the task with the difficulty manipulation). Specifically, we discuss how having control over task choices might lead to more stable information processing and allow people to choose more difficult tasks when this increased difficulty has a relatively small impact on their performance.