The Economic Sentinel Theory: Survival-Weighted Attention, Threats That Cannot Be Acted Upon and Liquidity

This paper develops the Economic Sentinel Theory (EST), a behavioural model of attention motivated by the processing and adjudication architecture of the brainstem theory of consciousness. Every incoming signal is scored by the stake it announces, valued relative to a cushion of liquid resources above subsistence and before any response is considered, and a capacity-constrained gate admits the highest-scoring stream to deliberation. The score is characterised by sequential consistency, scale invariance and consistency between gains and losses. Because it prices stakes rather than the value of acting, EST and value-based attention make distinct predictions for threats that cannot be acted upon: attention to them falls with liquidity under EST and does not respond to liquidity under the benchmark, and an encompassing gate identifies the weight on each motive. Below an explicit buffer threshold, such threats crowd out actionable opportunities. Automatic coverage of part of a threat restores attention at lower cost than an equal cash transfer, and the minimum coverage is explicit. The liquidity gradient survives competition with other financial news except against large opportunities at high liquidity. In a two-period model, sophisticated households save up to the threshold when they can afford to, while poorer households remain captured. Admission also creates a consumption discontinuity that survives Bayesian inference.