Figure 1

(A) Depiction of a human processing an incoming signal using one information processing system. (B) Depiction of a human processing an incoming signal using an additional second, redundant information processing system. Recruiting such a second system may come with costs such as a higher resource demand. (C) When making ecologically plausible assumptions about human capacity, the recruitment of a second, redundant information processing system can result in improved performance as measured by reward rate across different levels of assumed information processing speed. The x-axis represents the speed of processing from low to high, as measured by drift rate v (see section “The diffusion decision model”). The y-axis represents the reward rate advantage of two processing systems over one processing system. Red bars indicate positive values suggesting a two systems advantage, whereas blue bars would have indicated an advantage for one system. This figure represents the outcome for a subsample of the parameter combinations. More complete results are reported in the text below.