Mentally tracking extra information is exactly the sort of technique you’d expect to benefit a lot from excess cognitive capacity, i.e. high g-factor. Someone who can barely follow what’s going on already isn’t going to have the capacity to track a bunch of other stuff in parallel.
note that as one practices tracking something, the effort needed to track it goes down.
i don’t think it makes sense to think of it like needing excess cognitive capacity to track things. i think our skill improves to the point of needing little to no excess cognitive capacity. so we only need excess cognitive capacity for new things we want to track.
That only works for task where you get to do a similar enough thing, enough times. This seems true for driving, but less so for most types of research.
My capacity to track information in my head varies from day to day, depending on mood, sleep, etc. I can notice a clear difference in what I can and can’t do depending on this. When I have more limited mental capacity, I can still absorb facts, but I struggle to follow complex reasoning or draw independent conclusions (e.g. if this fact is true, what does that predict about the world?).
and then there’s the possibility of slowing down the activity we’re doing (or even chopping up the activity into separate phases so you can track things in-between the phases), allowing for more capacity to be used for tracking new things.
minor feedback...
note that as one practices tracking something, the effort needed to track it goes down.
i don’t think it makes sense to think of it like needing excess cognitive capacity to track things. i think our skill improves to the point of needing little to no excess cognitive capacity. so we only need excess cognitive capacity for new things we want to track.
That only works for task where you get to do a similar enough thing, enough times. This seems true for driving, but less so for most types of research.
My capacity to track information in my head varies from day to day, depending on mood, sleep, etc. I can notice a clear difference in what I can and can’t do depending on this. When I have more limited mental capacity, I can still absorb facts, but I struggle to follow complex reasoning or draw independent conclusions (e.g. if this fact is true, what does that predict about the world?).
and then there’s the possibility of slowing down the activity we’re doing (or even chopping up the activity into separate phases so you can track things in-between the phases), allowing for more capacity to be used for tracking new things.