In our new RR, we will test whether and how mental fatigue impacts dishonesty:

rr.peercommunityin.org/PCIRegistere...

I am already excited about the to-be-collected data.

Nice work led by Mara Bialas 👏 (also with @maartenboksem.bsky.social)

All of this is not to criticize Hull, who gave ample credit to Tsai.

But... I think we could cite Tsai a bit more often, when we discuss how people (and other animals) minimize the expenditure of effort.
(5/5)

Tsai's "law of minimum effort" (left, 1932) is super similar to Hull's "law of less work" (right, 1943). (3/5)

Tsai (1932) published a monograph titled "The laws of minimum effort and maximum satisfaction in animal behavior".

The monograph describes data from 21 T-maze experiments. Experiments 1-13 show that, when given the choice, rats learn to choose the option that requires least effort. (2/5)

Clark Hull usually gets credit for coming up with "law of less work" (or the "law of least effort") in 1943.

I recently learned that the Chinese psychologist Loh-Seng Tsai published the same idea 11 years before Hull.

🧵Short history thread (1/5):

Oh, wait, Bartley and Chute said this already *in 1945*.

I sometimes try to publish in work psych journals, and this is in line with my experiences:

"Unfortunately, journals in industrial, work, and organizational psychology still fail to support Open Science practices"

open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

This just came out: Three experiments suggest that specific and difficult task goals enhance sustained attention performance. 👁️👁️

I like how these authors applied theory from work psychology to their cognitive paradigm.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Yesterday, we organized an internal "Boost Your Skills Day" at our institute. We had workshops on theory development, methods/stats, and OS. No external guests, just ~90 faculty and students learning from each other. The vibe was optimistic and warm. Can highly recommend.

That's a nice question. I don't have the answers but I can try to speculate a bit:
I'd say cognitive fatigue is a unitary phenomenon, because it serves the same function in different contexts (i.e., it biases towards switching to different activities; and specifically, to low-effort activities)

Matthews et al. did an important innovation because they
- measured feelings of fatigue with high temporal resolution (even after every trial);
- used computational modeling to study how fatigue waxes (during physical *and* cognitive fatigue) and wanes (during rest).
doi.org/10.1016/j.co... (4/6)

Despite ~120 years of research, there is no mature theory of the origins of cognitive fatigue. A key problem is that fatigue is often treated as though it were a static quantity. It is not, e.g., see these ESM data: (3/6)

Fatigue may well increase in the next decades. Ironically, technological progress has historically increased, not decreased, the mental demands of work. Routine tasks are automatized first, leaving non-routine tasks for humans. Also, technological progress increases expected productivity. (2/6)

Short new paper: The ebb and flow of cognitive fatigue
authors.elsevier.com/a/1hwHP4sIRv...

I highlight the new findings by @quining.bsky.social et al. and I reflect on the current state of fatigue science. #psychscisky #cogsci #psychology

🧵Little thread with the main points: (1/6)