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Allocation of Resources

An Internet search for the term resource allocation first yields its application to economics or business—secondarily, to psychology. The term’s general meaning is consistent with its use in both psychology and economics, but both the resources (commodities) and processes involved in allocation (strategic distribution processes) can be quite different in their applications. This entry discusses resource allocation as it applies to psychology.

The nexus of these disciplines is perhaps best illustrated by the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Among many other important works, Kahneman authored the very influential book Attention and Effort as well as numerous works in experimental economics in which he and several collaborators applied principles of cognitive psychology to economics. His success with this application was rewarded with a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on prospect theory.

In psychological contexts (for this discussion, resources and the cognitive mechanisms for their allocation will be limited to the psychological domain, specifically for applications to language processing), resources are defined as things such as processing effort—or in Kahneman’s term, attention—and various forms of memory capacity and communication channels. Resources include the algorithms or commodities that can be used for the accomplishment of strategic objectives.

Required Mental Processes

The distribution or allocation of resources requires mental processes or functions capable of being deployed in portions for the performance of specific mental operations or computations to accomplish a goal. Each resource and allocation process is presumed to involve brain tissue of some sort, whether dedicated or shared with other mental functions. Damage to these areas can cause impairments to the mental functions they serve. Resources are the cognitive mechanisms used to support the processing of data, and allocation involves the processes or mechanisms by which resources are used to build representations or activate well-established rules and representations of language or other cognitive functions.

In 1975, the notion of data-limited and resource-limited processing was introduced. The data in this conceptualization consist of the stored or constructed representations and the sensory stimuli that are the information to be processed or acted on. Within this framework, when a goal is initiated, such as the production of a word or the comprehension of a sentence, it requires input data derived by accessing stored rules and representations for recall and production of the word or by receiving sensory stimuli for sentence comprehension.

Competition Between Data and Resources

These cognitive activities have to compete for the resources of memory storage and retrieval systems. The accomplishment of the goal requires both the data and the resources, but it also requires the allocation of the resources, particularly the deployment of attention for deciding how and where activation and inhibition are deployed. Inherent within the data and resource-limited model is the notion of competition between data and resources. For example, if data are limited because there is reduced access to semantic associations or impaired phonological encoding, there is a greater burden or tax on the resources.

Conversely, if there are limited resources in the form of reduced memory span or reduced or inefficient attention allocation, more or higher-quality data are required to successfully accomplish the goal. This competition requires the strategic use of these resources and the control processes that govern their deployment. Many people call this “executive attention,” whereas others call it the “central executive” or “supervisory attention.”

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