Capacity Limits & Attention

Primes about finite processing capacity and how its exhaustion degrades performance: attention and salience as selective bottlenecks, channel and cognitive-load limits, fatigue and depletion effects, and rate-limiting or pruning mechanisms that ration a scarce resource.

20 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Adaptive Capacity — Ability to change.
• Alertness — A standing capacity to notice, distinct from the act of attending.
• Attention — The selective allocation of a fixed processing capacity to some inputs while the rest are filtered out, surfacing scarcity upstream of every decision.
• Attentional Capacity — Finite pool of selection bandwidth whose exceeded supply degrades processing through interference, slowing, or capture.
• Channel Capacity — Any information-bearing medium has a hard upper bound on reliable throughput that effort cannot exceed.
• Cognitive Resource Depletion — Cognitive capacity degrades from sustained resource consumption.
• Decision Fatigue — Reduced decision quality over time.
• Information overload — When incoming information exceeds the receiver's finite capacity to select, integrate and act, additional input reduces understanding and decision quality instead of improving it.
• Joint Attention — Two or more agents share an attentional target and each knows the other attends to it.
• Mass — Concentrating finite resource on a single decisive point against a nonlinear response curve, rather than spreading the same resource thinly across all points.
• Oversight Capacity — Limits of supervision.
• Perceptual Expertise — Repeated category-specific exposure reallocates representational resolution toward the distinctions that vary within the trained category, so experts individuate its members finely while sparsely sampled categories remain coarsely coded.
• Rate Limiting — Cap the temporal rate at which an identifiable actor consumes a resource.
• Salience — A bottom-up, relational score by which items stand out from their surround before deliberate attention is allocated.
• Salience-as-Significance — A what-got-shown signal misread as a what-matters claim.
• Scalability — Handle growth.
• Shortcut Learning — An adapting system replaces the structure it was meant to learn with a cheaper incidental feature that correlates with success on its training distribution, and collapses sharply once that correlation breaks.
• Spaced Repetition — Reinforce over intervals.
• Streetlight Effect — Search effort concentrates where evidence is easiest to observe rather than where the sought answer is most likely to lie, systematically substituting accessibility for relevance.
• Task Interdependence — Tasks rely on each other.