Abstract:
This research tested the hypothesis that initial efforts at executive control temporarily undermine subsequent efforts at executive control. Four experiments revealed that controlling the focus of visual attention (Experiment 1), inhibiting predominant writing tendencies (Experiment 2), taking a working memory test (Experiment 3), or exaggerating emotional expressions (Experiment 4) undermined performance on subsequent tests of working memory span, reverse digit span, and response inhibition, respectively. The results supported a limited resource model of executive control and cast doubt on competing accounts based on mood, motivation, or task difficulty. Prior efforts at executive control are a significant contextual determinant of the operation of executive processes.
There has been much discussion around a self-regulation model which claims that effortful control of attention diminishes the ability to perform future tasks. This point has implications for task/work performance across the course of the day, how you manage your behaviour to best conserve and utilise this resource and how one can go about protecting and renewing it. From a developmental perspective the emergence of traits such as the Big Five is likely to be largely determined by the ability to manage,monitor and over time manipulate ones natural levels of reactivity through self-regulation. This process has an analogue in the cognitive neuropsychology literature in the functioning of executive attention which is the overarching process managing a group of executive functions such as attention shifting, inhibition, planning, working memory etc. What this study shows is that exercising executive control- a process analagous to self-regulation- has knock on effects on essential capacities such as working memory and inhibition.
In the last post the relationship between inhibition on the Go-NoGo task and delay discounting was demonstrated. Following on from this and incorporating this finding we can say that engaging in self-regulation is likely to diminish our capacity to inhibit our behaviour on a subsequent task and that our current level of this resource is likely to impact on our judgements in regard to valuing the future. We are likely to become more myopic in the scenario where such resources are diminished. Loewenstein and O'Donoghue have been working for a number of years on a sophisticated model of behaviour which incorporates such insights.
Several posts have pointed to glucose regulation as a process which may be the physiological concomitant of this 'ego' or regulatory resource depletion. Oxygen and other chemicals have been proposed to fluctuate in time with this metaphorical willpower resource but evidence demonstrating this is not yet available, and preliminary analyses (PhD work) would indicate oxygen is not promising in this regard. However, what this study provides is an integration of the work on self-regulation aforemention and what is an obvious observation to anyone who has given participants a battery of neuropsychological tests in that the tests must be counterbalanced to remove the effect of a gradient of decreased performance across the tasks as they progress. These task ordering and also time on task effects are accounted for using the self-regulatory resource model which is useful as it provides a frame within which individual baseline differences and factors which promote resilience or vulnerability of this resource can be examined. The current model suggests that it acts 'as a muscle' and becomes more efficitent over time. The idea that our daily work and also our ability to regulate moods and present ourselves well is dependent on a resource which can be manipulated in various ways also opens the possibility for a lot of crosstalk between economics and psychology.
Schmeichel et al. (2007)
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