At an abstract level, many everyday tasks ( Fig. It is often underappreciated just how difficult the tasks that humans encounter in modern life are. Thus, a meaningful impact of such drugs on real-world function is yet to be convincingly established. Most puzzling is that, even in clinical populations, mitigation of cognitive deficits has only mild benefits for functioning, for example, at school or in the workplace ( 4), which could be related to the finding in clinical trials that impact on executive function is smaller and/or dose related ( 10, 11). While improved cognitive capacities such as working memory have been shown, these effects appear to be more evident in clinical samples than the general population ( 6– 9), a finding that may be explained by ceiling effects. However, even if there is a subjective belief that these drugs are effective as cognitive enhancers in healthy individuals, evidence to support this assumption is, at best, ambiguous ( 5). Stimulant prescription-only drugs are increasingly used by employees and students as “smart drugs,” to enhance workplace or academic productivity ( 1– 4). Our findings suggest that “smart drugs” increase motivation, but a reduction in quality of effort, crucial to solve complex problems, annuls this effect. The latter can be attributed to increased randomness of solution strategies. 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. Effort (decision time and number of steps taken to find a solution) increases significantly, but productivity (quality of effort) decreases significantly. 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. The efficacy of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers in everyday complex tasks remains to be established.
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