Processing Speed

Processing speed is a domain-general construct describing how quickly the nervous system executes basic perceptual and cognitive operations. Salthouse (1996) proposed that a single general slowing factor accounts for a large share of age-related decline across many unrelated cognitive tasks, arguing that processing speed acts as a shared bottleneck: when it runs fast, downstream skills like working memory and decision-making operate efficiently, and when it slows, every downstream operation is affected.

Reference: Salthouse, 1996. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. Reading a teamfight and calling the correct rotation half a second before a slower-processing teammate does.
2. Parsing a minimap ping, a voice callout, and a visual cue in close succession without any one of them getting dropped.
3. The gradual across-session decline in raw response speed that shows up late in a long tournament day, independent of motivation.

The simple RT phase of NeuroRank's Reaction module is the platform's cleanest processing-speed proxy: a single expected stimulus with no decision component, so the resulting time reflects detection and motor initiation speed rather than choice or inhibition. It anchors the Reaction Speed dimension score.