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A Mechanistic Account of Stress-Induced Performance Degradation

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Abstract

Stress-induced performance degradation in high-pressure situations has been documented empirically and generated different explanations. The existing theories often assume the distinction between implicit and explicit processing but speculate differently on the impact that high-pressure situations have on their interaction. Although few attempts have been made so far at clarifying these underlying processes mechanistically (e.g., computationally), this paper proposes a detailed, mechanistic, and process-based account based on the Clarion cognitive architecture. This account incorporates facets of existing theories, but explores motivation, metacognition, and their effects on performance degradation. This account has been applied to different tasks that have previously suggested different explanations. These tasks were simulated within the Clarion cognitive architecture and results matched well with human data. Utilizing data from different tasks, we come up with a unified model of stress-induced performance degradation in high-pressure situations, which shows a unified, motivation-based, mechanistic account of these phenomena is possible, thus shedding light on the phenomena and pointing to mechanistic explanations of other related phenomena.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that, while we refer to processing in terms of explicitness or implicitness based on the Clarion framework [32, 34], this duality has been referred to with different terms by various researchers from different areas of psychology (often with slightly different meanings). We hope that our theoretical framework (Clarion, as will be discussed) can provide some mechanistic interpretations and thus clarification to these terms.

  2. Accessibility here refers to the direct and immediate availability of mental content for the major operations that are responsible for, or concomitant with, consciousness, such as introspection, forming higher-order thoughts, and verbal reporting, as well as meta-level control and manipulation.

  3. Briefly, this set of hypothesized primary drives bears close relationships to Maslow’s hierarchy, Murray’s needs, Reiss’s motives, and so on. The prior justifications of these frameworks may be applied to this set of drives as well (see, e.g., [26, 33]).

  4. Participants were told that they would be assigned a “modular arithmetic score” based on a combination of speed and accuracy and if they could improve that score by 20% relative to the proceeding block, they would receive $5. Participants were informed that they had been randomly paired with another individual and both had to improve to be rewarded the $5; they were told that their partner had already improved by the required amount. Participants were also told that they would be videotaped so that math professors could examine their performance.

  5. Analysis of response times suggested that changes in accuracy during the task were not a function of a trade-off between accuracy and speed [4].

  6. The division step was actually only “pseudo-division,” since the goal was simply to check for divisibility and not to actually perform the division.

  7. The six possible states are as follows:• Detect the need for borrow operations• Perform the borrow operation (if needed)• Perform first-column subtraction• Perform second-column subtraction•Combine columns and perform divisibility check• Deliver the response (true or false)

  8. Note that the bottom level had the ability to choose “do not know” at every step, allowing progressing explicitly to the correct solution.

  9. Stereotypic errors were defined as misclassifying a tool as a gun when primed with a black face, or a gun as a tool when primed with a white face.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Sebastien Helie for his help.

Funding

This study was funded (in part) by ARI grants W74V8H-05-K-0002 and W911NF-17-1-0236.

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  1. Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 Eighth Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Nicholas R. Wilson & Ron Sun

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  1. Nicholas R. Wilson
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Correspondence to Ron Sun.

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Wilson, N.R., Sun, R. A Mechanistic Account of Stress-Induced Performance Degradation. Cogn Comput 13, 207–227 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-020-09725-5

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