Cognitive Load 101 - Review
Leonardo Miodrag ??
?? Partner @ Scale Incubator | ??? Co-Founder @ Siite | ?? Driven by Innovation within Marketing & Entrepreneurship
As a CRO specialist, it's important to understand what cognitive load is. This week I explored the course of attention basics at CXL Institute Mini-degree of Digital psychology and persuasion.
Cognitive load is the amount of mental energy that is required to process something, in this case, your website. By minimizing cognitive load (and therefore avoiding cognitive overload), you can maintain users’ attention span, ultimately allowing them to browse your site and hopefully make a purchase before getting overwhelmed and abandoning ship.
What is Cognitive Load?
Factors that make learning harder or distract us from the information we’re trying to pay attention to increase cognitive load.
Examples range from rotating carousels that rotate too quickly, distracting/irrelevant graphics, confusing copywriting, an unclear value proposition, or poor navigation. The list goes on.
Simply put, cognitive load makes things harder for your potential customers and therefore, for yourself.
History of Cognitive Load
Cognitive load theory was first outlined in 1988 by John Sweller, an educational psychologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Sweller built on the working model of memory, which proposed that long-term memories develop when auditory and visual information is processed (or rehearsed) to a greater degree than other everyday observations (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974). Sweller believed that, as a result of higher cognitive load, a stimulus is more difficult to pay attention to, rehearse and remember, making learning less effective (Sweller, 1988).
John Sweller and other researchers have identified ways in which cognitive load can be reduced in a learning environment using more effective teaching methods, thus encouraging the formation of new memories.
Different Forms of Cognitive Load
Intrinsic Cognitive Load
This type of cognitive load refers to the complexity of the information at hand. The load exerted on a learner depends on how complex the task or concept being presented is, and a learner’s ability to understand the new information. Building a rocket ship is harder than building a birdhouse.
This type of cognitive load is, by nature, impossible to eliminate: you will always find a difficult, new activity (e.g. solving a complex equation) more challenging than a simple task (e.g. adding two small numbers together).
However, cognitive load can be significantly reduced by breaking information down into small, simple, clear steps. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible task at hand, the learner takes steps in a clear direction that lead them towards the goal.
These assembly instructions reduce cognitive load by minimizing and directing attention to the 4 most important parts of the stool.
You might be familiar with the task of assembling flat-pack furniture. Rather than assembly instructions containing just one large diagram showing how each piece fits together, the manufacturers simplify the process by splitting it into easy, step-by-step tasks. In doing so, they ensure that a customer needs to only grasp these easy-to-understand tasks (e.g. screwing a screw) as opposed to visualizing the entire process of assembling a desk, in order to set it up. They’re also able to focus only on the 2-3 parts they need to use in any one step, rather than a whole box of wooden parts, nails, and other fixings.
Extraneous Cognitive Load
Extraneous cognitive load is produced by the demands imposed on learners by the teacher, or the instructions that they are asked to follow. This type of cognitive load is increased by ineffective teaching methods, which unintentionally misdirect students with distracting information or make a task more complex than it needs to be.
Effective presentation methods reduce cognitive load, allowing the learner to stay focused on their mission, whether that be learning anatomy or deciding which pricing plan to go with.
Some types of information are more easily understood when illustrated in a diagram than via written instruction. The rotation of the moon as it orbits the earth, a relatively abstract idea to comprehend, is made simple when demonstrated visually, using a model of the solar system or a video. The visual presentation of concepts such as the solar system means that a learner doesn’t have to retain ideas explained early on in a paragraph in order to understand the final sentence. Instead, they can be referenced simply by looking at the illustration and no extraneous information needs to be filtered out.
Diagrams have proven to be effective illustrations to show the differences between pricing plans. Imagine how difficult it would be to try and determine the difference between these plans if there were a huge body of copy instead of this chart.
Diagrams have proven to be effective illustrations to show the differences between pricing plans. Imagine how difficult it would be to try and determine the difference between these plans if there were a huge body of copy instead of this chart.
Germane Cognitive Load
This third type of cognitive load is produced by the construction of schemas and is considered to be desirable, as it assists in learning new skills and other information.
A schema is a developed framework of an idea or object that tells us what to expect when we encounter it in the future. Schemas allow us to identify and differentiate between objects in the world. We use schemas constantly.
We form schemas for people, household objects and ‘script’ schemas for routines and events such as our morning routine, as well as schemas for particular ‘roles’ that we find people enacting, which tell us what kind of behaviour to expect from them.
When a stranger approaches you on a city street, your mental schemas tell you whether this person will be asking you for directions to the nearest tourist attraction, or for spare change. As a more relevant example, we all have (probably similar) schemas for what a trustworthy website looks like, versus a less trustworthy one.
Want to know more:
Schemas: Designing According to Users' Expectations by Interaction Design Foundation