The Return Gap: Why Consolidating Memory Is Not Automating Movement. Salience and Variability as Levers of Transfer-Oriented Immersive Training

Abstract. Prevailing practice in training for safety-critical tasks assumes that to train is to automate: to repeat a procedure until it becomes a reflex. This paper argues that this assumption conflates two anatomically and functionally distinct memory systems —declarative memory consolidation and procedural habit formation— and that this conflation creates a specific risk under pressure. Neuroscientific evidence indicates that acute stress biases the control of action away from flexible, goal-directed processes and toward rigid, habitual ones. As a result, what an operator executes when pressure rises is not what they understood, but what they consolidated as the dominant response. The paper introduces the return gap construct: the distance between the consolidated response and the response that the real situation —never identical to rehearsal— actually demands; stress does not close this gap, it widens it. The objective of immersive training is accordingly redefined: not to automate, but to consolidate a response that remains flexible, through two levers —salience, which favours consolidation, and controlled variability, which turns a rigid response into an adaptable schema— yielding a counterintuitive corollary: for transfer, functional fidelity matters more than photorealistic fidelity. English translation of the Spanish-language working paper "La distancia de retorno: por qué fijar memoria no es automatizar movimientos" (Diez, 2026).