# Conscious cognitive effort in cognitive control Joshua Shepherd **Keywords:** cognitive control, consciousness, mental effort **Abstract:** Cognitive effort is thought to be familiar in everyday life, ubiquitous across multiple variations of task and circumstance, and integral to cost/benefit computations that are themselves central to the proper functioning of cognitive control. In particular, cognitive effort is thought to be closely related to the assessment of cognitive control's costs. I argue here that the construct of cognitive effort, as it is deployed in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is problematically unclear. The result is that talk of cognitive effort may paper over Funding information Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Grant/Award Number: Azrieli Global Scholar; H2020 European Research Council, Grant/Award Number: 757698 significant disagreement regarding the nature of cognitive effort, and its key Edited by: Wayne Wu, Editor effort—that cognitive effort may manifest as a range of intentional or nonintentional actions the function of which is to promote greater success at para- functions for cognitive control. I highlight key points of disagreement, and several open questions regarding what causes cognitive effort, what cognitive effort represents, cognitive effort's relationship to action, and cognitive effort's relationship to consciousness. I also suggest that pluralism about cognitive digmatic cognitive control tasks—may be a fruitful and irenic way to conceive of cognitive effort. Finally, I suggest that recent trends in work on cognitive control suggests that we might fruitfully **Authors:** [[ADVANCED REVIEW]]