The Subjective Value of Cognitive Effort is Encoded by a Domain-General Valuation Network

Cognitive control is necessary for goal-directed behavior, yet people treat control as costly, discounting goal value by cognitive demands in a similar manner as they would for delayed or risky outcomes. It is unclear, however, whether a putatively domain-general valuation network implicated in other cost domains also encodes the subjective value (SV) of cognitive effort. Here, we demonstrate that a valuation network, centered on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, also encodes SV during cognitive effort-based decision-making. We doubly dissociate this network from a primarily frontoparietal network recruited as a function of decision difficulty. We also find evidence that SV signals predict choice and are influenced by state and trait motivation, including sensitivity to reward and anticipated task performance. These findings unify cognitive effort with other cost domains, and inform physiological mechanisms of SV representations underlying the willingness to expend cognitive effort.