Tim Dunn

Naval Health Research Center · Department of Warfighter Performance

Based on a recent metacognitive account, cognitive effort is the result of an inferential evaluation made over explicitly available cues. Following from this account, we present here a pre-registered experiment that tested the specific hypothesis that explicit awareness of cues that are aligned with cognitive demand is a prerequisite in avoiding ef...

The notion that individuals adapt their behaviors in ways that are sensitive to the effortfulness of cognitive processing is pervasive in psychology. In the current set of experiments, we provide a test of a cue-utilization account of how individuals decide which course of action is more or less effortful. In particular, we contrast the influences...

Our metacognitive ability to monitor and evaluate our cognitive performance is central to efficient and adaptive behaviors. Research investigating this ability has focused largely on tasks that rely exclusively on internal processes (e.g., memory). However, our day-today cognitive activities often consist of mixes of internal and external processes...

Human cognition unfolds in a multitude of environments, including those that are associated with extreme stressors. Successfully measuring and modeling behaviors in such environments is inherently difficult. The current effort aimed to assess variation in stability and flexibility of cognitive performance during cold stress, individual differences...

Purpose: Cold environments may deteriorate psychomotor performance due to slowing of neuronal signals, distractions caused by pain and discomfort, and loss of manual dexterity. The extent to which core temperature (T c) influences psychomotor performance in the cold has not been established. Therefore, psychomotor performance and T c were assessed...

Stress can impact perception, especially during use-of-force. Research efforts can thus advance both theory and practice by examining how perception during use-of-force might drive behavior. The current study explored the relationship between perceptual judgments and performance during novel close-combat training. Analyses included perceptual judgm...

Introduction While sleep duration is known to affect next-day cognitive performance and alertness, largely in a dose-response manner, the effects of disrupted sleep (where one is awoken multiple times overnight, common in military settings) are much less understood. Therefore, we examined the effects of experimentally disrupted sleep on morning cog...

Why are some actions evaluated as effortful? In the present set of experiments we address this question by examining individuals’ perception of effort when faced with a trade-off between two putative cognitive costs: how much time a task takes vs. how error-prone it is. Specifically, we were interested in whether individuals anticipate engaging in...

Based on a cue-based metacognitive account, cognitive effort is the result of an inferential evaluation made over explicitly available cues. Following from this account, we present here a pre-registered experiment that tested the specific hypothesis that explicit awareness of cues that are aligned with cognitive demand is a prerequisite in avoiding...

The claim that humans adapt their actions in ways that avoid effortful processing (whether cognitive or physical) is a staple of various theories of human behavior. Although much work has been carried out focusing on the determinants of such behaviors, less attention has been given to how individuals evaluate effort. In the current set of experimen...

In the current set of experiments our goal was to test the hypothesis that individuals avoid courses of action based on a kind of metacognitive evaluation of demand in a Demand Selection Task (DST).Individuals in Experiment 1 completed a DST utilizing visual stimuli known to yield a dissociation between performance and perceived demand. Patterns of...

Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by indepen...