WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, JOANNA SERVAES
The extent to which individuals are willing to make an effort at cognitive tasks may alter their reaction to psychostimulants, a new study in rats suggests. The work, published today (March 28) in Neuropsychopharmacology, shows that while lackadaisical rats concentrate harder if given amphetamine, the drug makes hard-working rats ease off. The rats' work ethics also altered their responses to caffeine.
Such studies are important because, in humans, an unwillingness to exert cognitive effort, called recruiting effort impairment by psychologists, can be symptomatic of underlying psychological disorders. "Impairment in recruiting effort shows up in a lot of different illnesses—post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, brain injury, ADHD, that sort of thing," says Jay Hosking of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a lead author of the ...
