Research in cognitive load theory is increasingly recognizing the importance of motivational influences on students’ (willingness to invest) mental effort, in particular in the context of self-regulated learning. Consequently, next to addressing effects of instructional conditions and contexts on groups of learners, there is a need to start investigating individual differences in motivational variables. We propose here that the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat may offer a useful model to study the motivational antecedents of (anticipated) mental effort. We also report four experiments as initial tests of these ideas, exploring how feedback valence affects students’ challenge/threat experiences, self-efficacy, and mental effort investment. The results showed that negative feedback leads participants to expect that they will have to invest significantly more effort in future problems than positive feedback (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or no feedback (Experiment 3). Had we not considered the motivational variables in investigating the effect of feedback conditions on effort investment, we would not have known that this effect was fully mediated and thus explained by participants’ feelings of self-efficacy (Experiments 1/2) and threat (Experiment 1). We would also have concluded that feedback does not affect the willingness to invest effort in future problems (all four experiments), whereas actually, there were significant indirect effects of feedback on willingness to invest effort via challenge (in Experiments 1/2) and threat (in all experiments). Thus, our findings demonstrate the added value of considering challenge and threat motivational states to explain individual differences in effort investment.

认知负荷理论的研究越来越认识到动机对学生（投入意愿）脑力努力的重要性，特别是在自我调节学习的背景下。因此，除了解决教学条件和环境对学习者群体的影响之外，还需要开始研究动机变量的个体差异。我们在此提出，挑战和威胁的生物心理社会模型可能提供一个有用的模型来研究（预期的）脑力努力的动机前因。我们还报告了四个实验作为对这些想法的初步测试，探索反馈效价如何影响学生的挑战/威胁体验、自我效能和脑力投入。结果表明，与积极反馈（实验 1、2 和 3）或无反馈（实验 3）相比，消极反馈会导致参与者预期他们必须在未来的问题上投入更多的努力。如果我们在调查反馈条件对努力投入的影响时没有考虑动机变量，我们就不会知道这种影响是完全中介的，因此可以通过参与者的自我效能感（实验1/2）和威胁感（实验1/2）来解释。 1）。我们还可以得出结论，反馈不会影响在未来问题上投入努力的意愿（所有四个实验），而实际上，反馈通过挑战（在实验 1/2 中）和威胁对投入努力的意愿有显着的间接影响（在所有实验中）。因此，我们的研究结果证明了考虑挑战和威胁动机状态来解释努力投资的个体差异的附加值。