Trying Harder Increases Cognitive Effort and Enhances Memory

"It just got too hard," says Geena Davis as Dottie Hinson in A League of Their Own. Baseball manager Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), refutes Dottie's explanation for quitting the game when he replies, "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great."

In a game like baseball, and in just about everything humans do, the "hard" has to do with both observable physical effort and the cognitive effort that lies beneath. But what do we really know about cognitive effort and how it affects experience and memory?

How much holdover is there with hard effort?

Sarah Master, Shanshan Li, and Clayton Curtis of New York University and New York University Abu Dhabi wanted to better understand how cognitive effort might affect the strength and durability of working memory representations. This was predicated on the idea that "understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying our cognitive abilities depends on understanding their interplay with factors such as cognitive effort." In simple terms, they designed an experiment that would assess "that some tasks require more effort than others and success depends on how hard we try."

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, these researchers had participants perform visual tasks that involved memorizing and later identifying a target location in easy conditions (which yielded fast response times) or difficult conditions (which had slower response times and triggered changes in pupil diameter). Participants were cued as to how challenging the upcoming task would be. In the analysis, the researchers "used fMRI to test how changes in cognitive effort, induced by changes in task difficulty, impact neural representations of working memory."

Increased effort makes it last.

While prefrontal cortex activity was elevated for hard trials, the effects of task difficulty were really clearly seen only in "patterns of activity in the visual cortex...where accuracy was higher on hard trials." These results suggest that "effort-related feedback signals sculpt population activity in the visual cortex, improving mnemonic fidelity." This work suggests that "cognitive effort—trying harder—improves the quality of working memory (WM) representations in the visual cortex mediated by feedback from the prefrontal cortex." This means that working memory resources can be strategically allocated during visuomotor tasks. This is quite interesting in its own right, but as the researchers point out, there are important potential clinical applications for "psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, where motivational deficits may masquerade as cognitive dysfunction."

Going above and beyond pays off later.

For me, these observations resonate strongly with plasticity in all physiological systems. We operate day-to-day within a certain range of effort for our activities. We have over time adapted to these activities, and they have slowly shifted to, more or less, "easy." It's only when we push beyond and shift to "hard" that our bodies and brains adapt to the new operating range. This takes me way back to my first book, Becoming Batman, in which this featured as the key concept. If the activity is strength training, our muscles get bigger and stronger, and if it's cognitive training, we enhance synaptic connectivity and memory representation. To get more, we do need to do more, and that means more effort is essential. Neurobiology really does show us that there is joy in effort and hard really does make it (a) great (memory).

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2024)