Measurement of cardiac and respiratory activity during mental simulation of locomotion at increasing speed revealed a covariation of heart rate and pulmonary ventilation with the degree of imagined effort. The degree of vegetative activation of a subject mentally running at 12 km/h was comparable to that of a subject actually walking at 5 km/h. This effect cannot be explained by an increase in ...

Mental and physical efforts, such as paying attention and lifting weights, have been shown to involve different brain systems. These cognitive and motor systems, respectively, include cortical networks (prefronto-parietal and precentral regions) as well as subregions of the dorsal basal ganglia (caudate and putamen). Both systems appeared sensitive to incentive motivation: their activity increa...

Here we report that large pupils predict fixations of the eye on low-salient, inconspicuous parts of a visual scene. We interpret this as showing that mental effort, reflected by a dilation of the pupil, is required to guide gaze toward objects that are relevant to current goals, but that may not be very salient. When mental effort is low, reflected by a constriction of the pupil, the eyes tend...

Background For the last decade, diverting arrestees with mental illness from the criminal justice to the mental health systems has been a mainstay of US mental health policy. However, data allowing us to gauge the size and charge characteristics of arrestees with mental illness have been generally unavailable to planners and policymakers in this area. This paper represents an effort toward prov...