Unlocking Mental Potential: Does Caffeine Modulate the Value of Cognitive Effort

Warda, Michelangelo (2025) Unlocking Mental Potential: Does Caffeine Modulate the Value of Cognitive Effort. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

While caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance, its role in cognitive effortbased decision-making and effort discounting remains underexplored. The current study investigated whether caffeine can influence subjective cognitive effort cost (CEC) by applying a repeated-measures, within-subjects design. Participants (N = 11) completed a cognitive-effort discounting (COG-ED) paradigm, based on an N-back task and a choice task. Cognitive effort cost (CEC) was the main variable for analysis and defined as the difference between a fixed reward and the indifference point (IP) for the respective N-back level. Contrary to the hypothesis, caffeine did not reduce CEC values. Instead, the descriptive trend showed elevated CEC values under caffeine at low to moderate task demand (N-2 and N-3), with a partial reversal of this trend at the highest task demand (N-4). Exploratory correlation analysis revealed significant positive correlations between subjective effort ratings (recorded by the NASA-TLX) and CEC at the highest task demand, suggesting greater alignment between perceived and behavioral effort appraisal. These findings may indicate that caffeine may increase CEC under moderate and low task demand, while enhancing metacognitive coherence under high cognitive load. Despite several limitations, this pilot study offers novel insights into caffeine´s interaction with motivation and effort-based decision making across varying levels of cognitive demand. The findings support a context-dependent model of caffeine´s effects on cognition, linking to theories of overarousal and effort-discounting in reward-based decision-making frameworks. Keywords: caffeine, cognitive effort cost, cognitive effort value, indifference points, effort-based decision-making, effort discounting, metacognition

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor)
Supervisor name:	Lorist, M.M.
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	None [Bachelor Psychology]
Date Deposited:	23 Jul 2025 07:21
Last Modified:	23 Jul 2025 07:21
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/5648

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