The Role of Mechanisms under High Processing Complexity

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of recent developments concerning mechanisms for predicting the outcome of complex processing tasks. Mechanisms describe procedural patterns of information processing resulting from processing demands, processing limitations, and various processing constraints in completing tasks with a high degree of processing complexity. Since the available mechanisms refer either to structural models or describe processes, they can be divided into structure- and process-based mechanisms. The proposed mechanisms fit a framework that enables one to distinguish between decay, overflow, and trade-off mechanisms. The results available so far demonstrate the usefulness of mechanisms for predicting the outcome of complex processing tasks.