Information about task progress modulates cognitive demand avoidance

People tend to avoid engaging in cognitively demanding tasks unless it is 'worth our while'-that is, if the benefits outweigh the costs of effortful action. Yet, we seemingly partake in a variety of effortful mental activities (e.g. playing chess, completing Sudoku puzzles) because they impart a sense of progress. Here, we examine the possibility that information about progress-specifically, the number of trials completed of a demanding cognitive control task, relative to the total number of trials to be completed-reduces individuals' aversion to cognitively effort activity, across four experiments. In Experiment 1, we provide an initial demonstration that presenting progress information reduces individuals' avoidance of cognitively demanding activity avoidance using a variant of the well characterized Demand Selection Task (DST). The subsequent experiments buttress this finding using a more sophisticated within-subjects versions of the DST, independently manipulating progress information and demand level to further demonstrate that, 1) people prefer receiving information about temporal progress in a task, and 2) all else being equal, individuals will choose to engage in tasks that require greater levels of cognitive effort when the more demanding option confers information about their progress in a task. Together, these results suggest that progress information can motivate cognitive effort expenditure and, in some cases, override individuals' default bias towards demand avoidance.