What is cognitive load and how does it affect corporate communications?

Communication is a broad discipline and not everything a communication or marketing team works on has the same objective. Where a blog article might be there to persuade or challenge conventional wisdom, an annual report might be there to articulate the performance of an organisation. Where a billboard ad might demonstrate the beauty or benefit of a product, a website video might be there to explain exactly what you can expect from a course, a service, or an event.

Some communication reassures. Some piques interest. Some outlines the good that comes from a donation.

But all communication seeks to elicit action from the reader or viewer. And one of the challenges for those creating the brochures, podcasts, articles, and reports is that these readers and viewers have a multitude of reasons not to take that desired action.

Not to click through to the next page.

Not to finish the survey.

Not to shift their perspective on a social problem.

Not to remember a key figure. Or to understand a central point.

Not to keep reading.

Among those many reasons is a psychological concept known as cognitive overload.

In this article, the first in a series, we’ll introduce the concept of cognitive load, and cognitive overload. We’ll also look at why cognitive load matters in the area of corporate communication.

What is cognitive load… and cognitive overload?

The first thing to say about cognitive load is that it’s a complex (and we think fascinating) subject. But in the spirit of… well, exactly what we’re about to talk about, we won’t bombard you with too much information straight away.

The second is that the theory behind cognitive load is linked closely with education, and specifically instructional design. But it clearly has implications beyond these fields.

So, let’s get into it. What are we talking about here?

Based on a theory developed by an Australian researcher, John Sweller, cognitive load is the the level of mental resources required to undertake a task. It’s the demand on your mind.

But it only relates to tasks related to what Sweller describes as “biologically secondary knowledge”. That’s just about anything you don’t learn “automatically” as a young child. Things like listening, and speaking a native language.

You generally get biologically secondary knowledge – learning maths, for example – by reading or listening to instruction. You can’t just naturally pick up this kind of knowledge.

Before we know, we need to remember

Sweller and his colleagues in the discipline have discovered that essential to the acquisition of secondary knowledge is memory. Here’s how Sweller himself describes it:

“…new secondary information must first be processed by our working (or short-term) memory. We use working memory when we are paying attention to something… When faced with new, secondary information, working memory can process no more than about two to three items of information at any given time and for only about 20 seconds.”

Knowledge starts to develop when we begin to transfer new information from our short-term memory to our long-term memory. Once it gets to long-term memory, we’re cooking with gas (or preferably green electricity). Long-term memory, according to Sweller, has “no known capacity or duration limits”. But short-term memory is “severely limited in capacity and duration“.

Here’s where cognitive load comes in. This short-term processing is difficult. And if the load is too high, we have a tendency not to learn well. This is cognitive overload.

When we’re cognitively overloaded we might become confused, might misunderstand, might even become defensive. And we might just give up.

Take reading an over-complex book as an example. Maybe a highly technical textbook or even a work of fiction with a multitude of characters, locations, and time shifts. Unless we’re really strong readers or totally invested, it’s so easy to lose track, get muddled and, ultimately, put the book down.

Or what about terms and conditions? We all know there’s important information within them, but few of us get past the first few sentences because they’re invariably long, unbroken slabs of copy written in legalese.

What’s this got to do with my donation form or blog post?

When we produce an annual report or create a webpage, we do so with the expectation that someone will, in Sweller’s words, “pay attention” to it. And, as we’ve already discussed, we then want them to take some kind of action.

But if we ignore cognitive load, we might be presenting information that is difficult for short-term memory to process. And that makes it less effective than it could be.

If the subject is interesting enough to our potential donor, customer, or supporter they might look at our piece of communication. But if it asks too much of the reader or viewer’s limited working memory, that desired next step – the button click, the brochure download, the understanding of a service or message – may never take place.

So, as a professional communicator, how can you and your team reduce cognitive load for your audience?

We’ll talk more about that in the next articles in this series:

• How you can employ images to help readers avoid cognitive overload.
• Why you should think about cognitive load as you present numbers.