Cognitive Load (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia’s article on cognitive load — the mental effort working memory expends during a task — and Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory. Wikipedia articles are continuously edited, so year above reflects the access date (2026-08-27), not a fixed publication year.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- Working memory is “extremely limited in both capacity and duration”; Miller’s 1956 estimate of roughly seven items, plus or minus two, is the commonly cited capacity ceiling cognitive load theory builds on.
- Three load types: intrinsic (a task’s inherent difficulty, not reducible by presentation, though it can be broken into smaller subschemas taught separately), extraneous (load added by how information is presented — the part under a designer’s or instructor’s control), and germane (the working-memory resources a person dedicates to actually processing the intrinsic load, which rises as extraneous load falls).
- Worked example of extraneous load: describing a square verbally instead of showing an image of one wastes working-memory resources reconstructing something a direct visual would have conveyed immediately.
- Digital distraction and multitasking — particularly social-media use — measurably increase cognitive load and reduce task performance.