Levels-of-processing effect

Biological Parallel

Ants lay stronger pheromone trails to high-value food sources—investing more signal where payoff justifies cost. Deep semantic processing burns 3-5x more glucose than surface encoding but creates memories integrated with existing knowledge networks, enabling better prediction. Shallow training (rote memorization) is like weak pheromone trails: it fades fast because the brain correctly predicts low future utility.