The Recruitment and Termination Threshold (RTT) Framework: A Threshold-Based Model of Neurodivergent Cognitive Variation

Existing dual-process accounts treat deliberative recruitment as situationally triggered, without adequately accounting for stable individual differences in how readily it occurs or how long it persists. The Recruitment and Termination Threshold (RTT) Framework proposes that both are governed by independent constitutional parameters: a Recruitment Threshold (RT), determining when intuitive processing gives way to deliberate auditing, and a Termination Threshold (TT), determining when active audits are released. Treating them as distinct axes generates a structured parameter space from which cognitive profiles, clinical presentations, and comorbidity patterns follow as derivable consequences. The low-RT pole maps onto the Autistic cognitive profile; its structural counterpart — the high-RT configuration characterized by reduced spontaneous recruitment — is designated as the Intuitistic, with a candidate population partially identifiable in the emerging literature on Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome. TT variation independently derives the subtype structure of ADHD, distinguishing hyperactive and inattentive presentations as high-TT and low-TT configurations respectively. The framework was developed from first principles; its alignment with empirical patterns that existing models leave unexplained is offered as corroborating evidence rather than post-hoc fit. RTT proposes that extreme threshold configurations produce sustained metabolic costs when mismatched with environmental demands, and that this mismatch constitutes the core mechanism of neurodivergent disorder. The framework generates falsifiable predictions, chief among them that recruitment frequency and deliberation persistence will prove statistically dissociable from each other and from general cognitive capacity. Disorder, within this model, is reframed as the predictable outcome of a constitutional threshold configuration meeting an environment it was not shaped to navigate.