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Liquin: Told the answer would cost them, people wanted it just as much — Fukai Reads
A paper by Emily G. Liquin on curiosity and effort. Across three preregistered experiments with 419 participants, telling people how much effort an answer would cost reliably reduced whether they went after it, yet barely moved how curious they said they felt.
Hendijani and Steel: Letting people choose moved nothing; a number in the corner of the screen did — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed paper by two authors from the University of Tehran and the University of Calgary (Frontiers in Psychology, published 13 August 2026). In a memory test with 270 people it compared letting participants choose against paying them per correct answer: the reward added about seven recalled words, while choice produced no statistically confirmed effect. Eye tracking showed the reward's effect ran through whether people looked at the on-screen reward display.
Lu et al.: Is Flow Made of Difficulty, or of the Effort You Spend? — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed study by Hairong Lu and colleagues (Psychological Research, 2025) on flow and mental effort. Manipulating perceived difficulty and expected odds of success separately in a visual discrimination task, the difficulty manipulation landed hard (partial eta-squared = 0.64) while expectancy showed only a weak trial-level effect (d = 0.04); the inverted-U in flow was marginal (p = 0.053) and P300 showed no relation to flow. An exploratory study with N = 37.
