Elizabeth Bowman, David Coghill, Carsten Murawski, Peter Bossaerts
2023 · Science Advances
The efficacy of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers in everyday complex tasks remains to be established. Using the knapsack optimization problem as a stylized representation of difficulty in tasks encountered in daily life, we discover that methylphenidate, dextroamphetamine, and modafinil cause knapsack value attained in the task to diminish significantly compared to placebo, even if the chance of finding the optimal solution (~50%) is not reduced significantly. Effort (decision time and number of steps taken to find a solution) increases significantly, but productivity (quality of effort) decreases significantly. At the same time, productivity differences across participants decrease, even reverse, to the extent that above-average performers end up below average and vice versa. The latter can be attributed to increased randomness of solution strategies. Our findings suggest that “smart drugs” increase motivation, but a reduction in quality of effort, crucial to solve complex problems, annuls this effect.
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>well...they act weird, a bit more frenzied and not necessarily more productive on deep thinking tasks. This matches up with some research on that exact subject. "Our findings suggest that “smart drugs” increase motivation, but a reduction in quality of effort, crucial to solve complex problems, annuls this effect." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165
I've long wished for more studies like this. So it's good too see. This one does miss some important variables: 1. Dose-dependent effects 2. Naive vs experienced users of a drug 3. Novel vs familiar task Though the authors spend a lot of time showing these stimulants reduce work efficiency, their central finding seems to be: "There was no significant effect of drug on performance" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165
> All of the drugs also increased the number of times the participants moved items in and out of the knapsack. “Thus, if one measures motivation in terms of time spent or number of items moved, drugs clearly enhanced motivation,” the team writes. However, on average, the drugs did not increase ‘effort quality’ or productivity, measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move. Productivity was lower in all three drug conditions, compared with placebo. This "measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move" is an unusually chosen metric. Why would it not simply be the best/total score in the allotted time. This preemptively punishes sustained effort which is…
one of the increased behaviors. I'd like to see this done again with a different problem, a different metric, or simply their raw data. Now that I think about it, all of these types of reports should include the raw data or GTFO. This one seems to provide some on the referenced https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165 > MATLAB code that generates the statistics and figures, along with underlying data, can be found in the notebook “figures.mlx” and “SOM.mlx” of the GitHub repository bmmlab/PECO (https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835).
Nice article, but looking at the primary source, what the authors completely forgot to measure or even so much as discuss [0], is the effect of participants physical well-being on performance when under the influence of these drugs. They solely focus on the patients cardiac profile, I'm assuming for safety as these drugs can raise blood pressure quite a bit. Also, the sample size is strikingly small for a 4 cohort study on the effects of a drug on behavior (n = 30, 17 males, 23 females, but subdivided into 4 groups). Performance enhancing drugs can have a myriad of effects on physical well being. The amount dispensed to participants was at least for Ritalin strikingly…
high. 30mg is a dose you get after at least 1-2 months of raising the dosage from 10mg, and that' the _retarded_ pill. If these were unretarded tablets, no doubt the participants must have felt completely wired up. The results look to me as if you drugged a bunch of people, told them to do something and they performed worse, but not much worse, probably because they were complaining of side effects. I know that's a polemic interpretation of the results, but I feel like I'm entitled to it, given the authors one sided discussion. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.add4165
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