Cognitive effort is a key factor in exploring how the"black box"of the translator's mind works,and it is also one of the most challenging topics in machine translation post-editing research.This paper discusses the definition and four com-monly used measurement methods of cognitive effort in post-editing,reviews the main empirical research results,and reflects on the existing problems in related research from five aspects,including research questions,language pairs,experimental sam-ples,research methods and conclusions.Then the paper puts forward suggestions for future research accordingly with a view to deepening the academic community's understanding of the cognitive processing model and mechanism of post-editing,and pro-viding implications for empirical research on post-editing and translation education in China.