Secondary Hypervigilance, Attentional Allocation, and Everyday Memory: An Evidence-Informed Conceptual Framework

Everyday forgetting is often described as a memory problem, although many lapses may arise before the integrity of stored information is tested. Attention can be captured by uncertainty, interpersonal tension, or anticipated disruption, leaving fewer cognitive resources available for encoding, maintaining intentions, and retrieving information. This conceptual article develops an evidence-informed framework for understanding how recurrent threat-signalling within close relationships may contribute to a partly automatic monitoring style in another person. The provisional construct secondary hypervigilance refers to learned or reinforced readiness to detect interpersonal signs of risk, instability, or emotional change. The framework integrates research on social learning, emotional referencing, attentional bias, attentional control, working memory, divided attention, stress-sensitive retrieval, prospective memory, and everyday cognitive failures. It proposes that repeated relational cues may shape attentional priorities; those priorities may compete with goal-directed cognition; and the resulting competition may appear subjectively as forgetfulness. The complete pathway has not been demonstrated as a single causal sequence, and the construct is not presented as a clinical category. Accordingly, the article distinguishes established findings from integrative inference, specifies alternative explanations and boundary conditions, and derives falsifiable hypotheses for longitudinal, dyadic, experimental, and everyday-life research. Its contribution lies in linking relationally acquired monitoring to phase-specific memory processes while preserving the possibility that simpler cognitive, contextual, or reciprocal explanations may better account for any particular pattern.