In psychology, effortfulness is the subjective experience of exertion when performing an activity, especially the mental concentration and energy required. In many applications, effortfulness is simply reported by a patient, client, or experimental subject. There has been some work establishing an association among reported effortfulness and objective measures, such as in brain imaging. Effortfulness is used as a diagnostic indicator in medical and psychological diagnosis and assessment. It is also used as an indicator in psychological experimentation, especially in the field of memory.[1]

In the study of aging, Patrick Rabbitt proposed an effortfulness hypothesis in the 1960s: that as their hearing became less acute with age, people would require additional effort to make out what was said and that this effort made it harder to remember it.[2]

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  1. ^ Language, Memory, and Aging, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 262, ISBN 9780521448765
  2. ^ Tun; McCoy; Wingfield (2009), "Aging, Hearing Acuity, and the Attentional Costs of Effortful Listening", Psychology and Aging, 24 (3): 761–766, doi:10.1037/a0014802, PMC 2773464, PMID 19739934