Mental load is not the best way to look at performance hits from psychic states. The more central concept is attention. It's the contextual switches, the act of

Mental load is not the best way to look at performance hits from psychic states. The more central concept is attention. It's the contextual switches, the act of maintaining or allocating attention and the physical effects of stress on the brain that lead to reduced performance. Though short term states (conflicting active representations, attention and working memory[+]) share some mechanisms with long term negative states ( => stress, attentional sinks meant to bias the individual towards resolution that no longer work as well in the modern setting due to reduced personal agency), The article muddles things by overloading the two concepts. But regarding exploration vs Exploitation, it is indeed a very important concept. It is most studied in the literature in terms of "Bandit Algorithms" (you can play Go well with a version specialized for trees), imitation learning and reinforcement learning. Exploiting too much does not often lead to optimal long term rewards or minimized regret. A fair amount of recent reinforcement learning research has been how to get an agent to explore complex state spaces more widely. We can even look at things at the societal level using this rubric. Basic research can be seen as exploring and focusing on product can be viewed as exploitation. It is my belief that things are weighted too much towards exploitation, currently. [+] "Another possibility, though, is that activation of the internally attended content is attenuated when attentional resources must be diverted to the articulation task. " in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3594067/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3594067/ [+] "Engle and colleagues have investigated individual differences in WMC (working memory capacity) in young adults, and have argued that WMC is related to the ability to control attention, particularly under conditions of interference or distraction" in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852635/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852635/