A Mechanistic Account of Stress-Induced Performance Degradation

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.