Lessons from Defining Theories of Stress for Cognitive Architectures

This chapter describes a range of theories of how cognition is influenced by stress. It uses a cognitive architecture, ACT-R (adaptive control of thought-rational), to represent these theories formally. The theories make suggestions for developing cognitive architectures, in that nearly all of them require that time-on-task influence performance, and at least one suggests that workload and strategies are monitored to access and cope with stress. By examining the theories as a whole, it becomes evident how the stress theories and the mechanisms that give rise to them can be tested. It can also be seen that they are incomplete, in that individually and as a group they do not make predictions that are consistent with data. For example, many of them do not predict that repeated serial subtraction (part of the Trier Social Stressor Task) will be affected by stress (and it is). This chapter also considers architectural overlays and describes a sample task to help explain the application of overlays.