Reading a 2016 paper on inquiry-based learning where "cognitive load" is once again used as a reason to stop any learner from doing anything FUN and HARD and EXPLORATORY my God
Being alive increases your cognitive load. We are not in some kind of robotic fry-out state every time we have to consume novel information. Working in a repetitive assembly line is low cognitive load and also destroys people
This one little tiny concept taken out of context is used for so many bad arguments.
@grimalkina omg exactly. I'm like whatever, it's task-related load that means they're grappling with ideas, so back off.
I push back with the notion that you need friction to get traction.
(The same people will happily pile on the educator's cognitive load via a shedtonne of unnecessary administrivia, testing, etc. )
Also, old theories from the 70s that were used in extremely specific contexts like classrooms are not inclusive of all we now know about plasticity, the incredible effects of challenge, the dangers of modeling the human mind as an empty bucket that "fills" to capacity and then can't work.
Such little respect for the human mind and all the fields that have been studying it when we cherrypick one concept like this.
I mean why not fixate on the spacing effect or the testing effect instead.
@grimalkina I think my favourite bit of research in the category of “massively misinterpreted and overused” would be Miller’s “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”. Heard it used as justification on everything from team size (!) to the number of items on a menu (!!).
@grimalkina I owned sevenplusorminustwo.com for a few years with the intent of putting a bunch of “FFS this is what it actually means” content there — but never got around to it :)
@adrianh well I'm surprised you haven't cashed in on "watching one psych 101 video on YouTube" and written an entire book about The Science of the Magic Number and How it Solves All Your Product Problems
@grimalkina
Yeah we don't seem to do enough with context or subtlety anymore. See also obsession with post-traumatic growth - there are also a lot of folks out there who think the stress is always inherently good Because Post Traumatic Growth. & we end up getting factions fighting for dominance, neither of which really groks the thing they're optimizing for.
@grimalkina I’d like to try a few decades with this overcorrection before we go back to the “neurotypicals just tell me to try harder” of my past, thanks
@jason literally, the usage I am talking about is using this idea to discourage people from taking an exploratory, adaptive approach to their own learning that allows for far more inclusive practices. As a learning scientist I've been directly told for example that children should not be taught ABOUT neurodiversity or the experiences of others inside of their classrooms BECAUSE it "increases cognitive load."
@promovicz yeah well typically people who want to explain everything with cognitive load are only interested in or comfortable with the idea of isolated cognitive quirks in human learning, but there are potentially more valuable ones than cognitive load!
@grimalkina I dropped out because school didn’t give me enough „cognitive load“ - which is the norm for intelligent kids. So… it‘s definitely a biased idea.
@grimalkina hypothesis: it should not be about "reducing cognitive load" but "making cognitive load manageable" - as in, giving the person the ability to make the most effective choice about the load they experience.
No undue burden, but also the explicit expansion of the action space available to you. If you want more load... you should be able to do that, and at that point the tool should not be in your way either. (?)
@grimalkina Thought experiment: What would happen if you turned this on its head and asked: how can we increase the "cognitive load" and what would be the resultant experience?
@rebeccawb well I think the research literature on productive friction and productive challenge is a good answer to that. But also like, even claims about working memory constraints are honestly a little flawed and dated. The rules everyone repeats like it's some kind of mystical law are more like dated guesstimates from really specific studies.
@rebeccawb@sjthomas are you trying to somehow imply I don't understand that stress can be bad? You're talking about an effect on a much higher and more holistic level than cognitive load. Of course I understand that too much stress is bad I'm a goddamn psychologist.
@grimalkina@sjthomas I know you are. And I respect your work. I was not attempting to put you down, but to engage in a nuanced dialog. Hard to do over toots.
@rebeccawb@sjthomas no worries. I don't enjoy the gotcha style many employ on mastodon so I always try to clarify if that is happening. This is just my experience interacting with the over-extension of a specific theory and there is often a knee-jerk attitude from software practitioners like I am not allowed to just think about a theory or something. I do not get it, this is a concept that doesn't belong to software
@grimalkina@rebeccawb
Not at all. Having come from that domain and now doing software I will occasionally leverage these terms when addressing poor design choices or the ways in which we track and assign work (I'm looking at you managers who manage via Jira)
@sjthomas@rebeccawb well then perhaps your use case for it is not taken out of context. However I am relatively certain this example is probably also talking about attentional load, decision fatigue, and a host of things that happen here, if it matters. I don't think the individualistic and reductionistic model of human problem solving as a working memory constraint is serving tech teams much
Difficult to tell from a toot. If Yerkes Dodson being referenced as a real thing? Or funny because it doesn’t replicate outside the original tortured mice experiment?
@mlevison@sjthomas@grimalkina I support those objectives, Mark. And another hot button I have is the words people use to describe their work also has deep implications about how we approach it. Most sw folks aren't going to go back to read original research. I'm at a phase in my life where I can (and do). And yet...bridging such research into a professional setting seems to be ad hoc (and mostly done without running experiments).
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