cognitive-effort

Cognitive-effort is the deliberate investment of attentional and processing resources required to perform a cognitively demanding task. It is characterized by three measurable parameters: (1) subjective feeling of difficulty reported by the agent, (2) behavioral indicators including slower response times and reduced secondary-task performance, and (3) neurophysiological markers such as prefrontal cortex activation and pupil dilation. The persistence mechanism is psychological theory combined with subjective experience — it exists as a category that agents use to describe, measure, and regulate their own mental exertion. The concept maps the felt cost of thinking, not the underlying neural mechanics. [formal: cognitiva effortis | substrate: mind | horizon: a moment | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]