Definition
Effort is derived from the French word meaning “to force.” Today it is widely used to refer to the expenditure of energy (i.e., work) to achieve a particular goal. Within psychology, effort refers to controlled attention or intentional processing that is required to complete demanding tasks that require intense attentional focus or sustained performance.
Historical Background
Effort was one of the subjective experiences that psychologists of the early twentieth century tried to account for as they contemplated the nature of consciousness, attention, intention and “will.” James (1890) in his Principles of Psychology and lectures to teachers on attention distinguished between spontaneous passive attention and voluntary attention, which is “deliberate and effortful.” He stated that deliberate attention could not be sustained indefinitely, thus linking attentional effort to the idea that people have limited capacity for sustained attention.
Kahneman (1973) formalized the...
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Cohen, R.A. (2011). Effort. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79948-3_1296
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