Cognition is a pipeline with limited-capacity stages — when load exceeds capacity, something has to queue, degrade, or get skipped.
decision fires when accumulated_evidence > threshold
load reduces threshold headroom
- Processing nodes — perception, attention, memory and decision stages in the pipeline.
- Pathway connectivity — how directly a stimulus can route between stages.
- Stimulus rate — how frequently new information enters the pipeline.
- Cognitive load threshold — the load level beyond which processing starts to bottleneck and errors rise.
This bottleneck pattern explains why multitasking under high cognitive load produces measurably more decision errors than the same tasks done sequentially.