The Value of Progress Feedback in Physical Effort-Based Decision Making

Progress feedback can encourage the pursuit of effortful endeavors but less is known about the interindividual differences in this effect or why progress feedback is valuable. Across two experiments, we tested whether people preferred physically effortful tasks involving progress feedback. We further examined whether preference for progress feedback could be explained by mental health factors, lower perceived effort, or improved effort exertion characteristics. Participants performed an online effort-based decision-making task, choosing between options with progress feedback and with no progress feedback. The task required making alternating movements and button clicks on the screen using a mouse under a limited time to receive a fixed reward. We recorded continuous movements and clicks during effort exertion with mouse tracking. Overall, participants preferred to receive progress feedback. Preference for progress was positively associated with social motivation, as measured using the apathy motivation index, but not with traits previously linked to information seeking. Progress feedback did not significantly reduce the subjective rating of effort nor did it significantly improve effort exertion efficiency. These results suggest that the value of progress feedback trades off against effort costs in decision making. The correlation with social motivation highlights a potential link to external validation, which warrants testing in future studies.