Demand avoidance in value-based choice under risk: A behavioral and pupillometric examination

Why does decision-making sometimes feel demanding while other times feel effortless? The dominant view of cognitive effort suggests that, all else being equal, individuals prefer to avoid mentally effortful courses of action-an empirical phenomenon that has been well-studied in cognitive control paradigms. However, less work has investigated cognitive demand avoidance in value-based decisions. Here we investigate subjective (self-reported) demand, preferences for demand, and psychophysiological measures of effort outlay in the context of risky decision-making. Across three experiments (N = 199), we observe that individuals evaluate choice pairs-consisting of two options with described risk levels and reward magnitudes-with less discriminable expected value differences as subjectively more demanding. More interestingly, participants exhibit a robust preference for low-demand risky choice pairs in a novel Decision Demand Task, which we modeled after a well-characterized demand selection paradigm used in the cognitive control domain. Finally, using pupillometry, we find that participants, contrary to our expectations, exhibit larger task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs)-a well-characterized measure of momentary effort exertion-when choosing between low-demand versus high-demand risky choice pairs, and that these TEPR magnitudes predicted subsequent demand-avoidant preferences. Together, these results demonstrate that cognitive demand avoidance generalizes beyond cognitive control tasks to risky value-based choice.