4 ms·

I'd be interested to know when/where the term "cognitive load" first appeared, if anyone knows.

by pg 13y ago

ricardobeat 13y ago
The term comes from psychology, so probably a few decades back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load In relation to the web, a quick Google Scholar search brings up lots of papers from the 1990s: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1980&as_yhi=2000 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22...
- pg 13y ago
  I poked around myself and the earliest use of the term I can find is in an article from 1968: Pupil size and problem solving JL Bradshaw The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968 Of course when I tried to read the text of the article, I got a message saying Sorry, you do not have access to this article. How to gain access: Recommend to your librarian that your institution purchase access to this publication.
  - staunch 13y ago
    Here's one from 1970 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cognitive+load%22&dq=%22cognitive+load%22 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cogni... If you search that book for "cognitive load is defined" you get the snippet: > "Cognitive load" is defined loosely as the amount of mental strain put on a person during the performance of some task, often at least partially due to the constraints placed on the performance of that task...
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    "Pupil size changes were monitored during the solution of various types of problems. A number of solution and response strategies were required of the subject. There was strong confirmation of the theory that this autonomic index can provide a sensitive measure of the fluctuating levels of attention and arousal, which are associated with the various aspects of information processing and response." PDF link (bad quality): http://www.filedropper.com/article http://www.filedropper.com/article
  - mjn 13y ago
    The related term "mental load" seems to be a few years older, coming mostly from precursors to HCI, such as industrial ergonomics. Here's a use from 1961, also paywalled, but with the abstract available: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930502 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930502 It's also used in this 1961 paper, which looks at spare mental capacity of car drivers compared to the mental load imposed by various driving situations: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930505 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930505 Here's the crude Google ngrams view of some of the variant terms: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cognitive+load%2Ccognitive+workload%2Ccognitive+overhead%2Cmental+load%2Cmental+workload%2Cmental+overhead&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share= http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cognitive+load%... The "mental load" data is polluted by OCR errors like "supple- mental load" though, especially earlier on.
  - pekk 13y ago
    It continues to be absolutely appalling what a large majority of academic work is locked away from the public.
- neonkiwi 13y ago
  It's far older than the 90s, but that's a product largely of what old papers have been digitized, and minorly on the terminology—I think you'll find some papers that say 'cognitive workload.' I recently fixed up an old bit of scientific apparatus, which was used to measure the cognitive workload of various aircraft cockpit designs. It used a method called visual occlusion, which you can guess the rest of—the pilots would sit in trainers with a set of glasses, that had spring-loaded solenoid flaps to block the pilots' vision selectively. The open time as well as the frequency of the system was experimentally varied until the pilot could fly the plane safely, for given conditions. The vacuum tube circuit that I repaired had a date stamp from the mid seventies but this technique was already more than a decade old by then. The same technique is now used (with liquid crystal shutters) to evaluate interfaces in cars for drivers, maybe a variant would be useful for certain application areas of software (modulating the screen, perhaps)?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
jdrobins2000 13y ago
Is that the equivalent of a "brain dump"? ;)
adrianhoward 13y ago
I don't have an academic library to hand - but I'd guess you would have seen the phrase in the sixties in academia, but it probably didn't have the same meaning as it does today. The roots of the idea of cognitive load - rather than the phrase itself - can be traced back to Miller's seminal (and much misinterpreted) "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" (http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Miller%20GA%20Magical%20Seven%20Psych%20Review%201955.pdf http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Mill...) although he didn't use the term "cognitive load" itself. The term "cognitive load" was certainly used in the 60's and 70's - I remember reading it in papers - but IIRC it didn't really have any formal definition or model at that point. Modern uses of cognitive load track back to John Sweller's development of Cognitive Load Theory in the 80's. It was his work that really popularised it and pushed it out as a well recognised term in things like instructional design and the various disciplines that have morphed into what we now call UX.
noonespecial 13y ago
I saw it mentioned in some very old literature when studying for my pilot's license. (Sometimes as "mental load") so I'd say its been kicked around in aviation since at least the mid 60's.

I'd be interested to know when/where the term "cognitive load" first appeared, if anyone knows.

by pg 13y ago

I'd be interested to know when/where the term "cognitive load" first appeared, if anyone knows.

The term comes from psychology, so probably a few decades back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load In relation to the web, a quick Google Scholar search brings up lots of papers from the 1990s: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1980&as_yhi=2000 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22...

pg 13y ago
I poked around myself and the earliest use of the term I can find is in an article from 1968: Pupil size and problem solving JL Bradshaw The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968 Of course when I tried to read the text of the article, I got a message saying Sorry, you do not have access to this article. How to gain access: Recommend to your librarian that your institution purchase access to this publication.
- staunch 13y ago
  Here's one from 1970 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cognitive+load%22&dq=%22cognitive+load%22 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cogni... If you search that book for "cognitive load is defined" you get the snippet: > "Cognitive load" is defined loosely as the amount of mental strain put on a person during the performance of some task, often at least partially due to the constraints placed on the performance of that task...
- agilebyte 13y ago
  "Pupil size changes were monitored during the solution of various types of problems. A number of solution and response strategies were required of the subject. There was strong confirmation of the theory that this autonomic index can provide a sensitive measure of the fluctuating levels of attention and arousal, which are associated with the various aspects of information processing and response." PDF link (bad quality): http://www.filedropper.com/article http://www.filedropper.com/article
- mjn 13y ago
  The related term "mental load" seems to be a few years older, coming mostly from precursors to HCI, such as industrial ergonomics. Here's a use from 1961, also paywalled, but with the abstract available: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930502 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930502 It's also used in this 1961 paper, which looks at spare mental capacity of car drivers compared to the mental load imposed by various driving situations: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930505 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930505 Here's the crude Google ngrams view of some of the variant terms: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cognitive+load%2Ccognitive+workload%2Ccognitive+overhead%2Cmental+load%2Cmental+workload%2Cmental+overhead&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share= http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cognitive+load%... The "mental load" data is polluted by OCR errors like "supple- mental load" though, especially earlier on.
- pekk 13y ago
  It continues to be absolutely appalling what a large majority of academic work is locked away from the public.
neonkiwi 13y ago
It's far older than the 90s, but that's a product largely of what old papers have been digitized, and minorly on the terminology—I think you'll find some papers that say 'cognitive workload.' I recently fixed up an old bit of scientific apparatus, which was used to measure the cognitive workload of various aircraft cockpit designs. It used a method called visual occlusion, which you can guess the rest of—the pilots would sit in trainers with a set of glasses, that had spring-loaded solenoid flaps to block the pilots' vision selectively. The open time as well as the frequency of the system was experimentally varied until the pilot could fly the plane safely, for given conditions. The vacuum tube circuit that I repaired had a date stamp from the mid seventies but this technique was already more than a decade old by then. The same technique is now used (with liquid crystal shutters) to evaluate interfaces in cars for drivers, maybe a variant would be useful for certain application areas of software (modulating the screen, perhaps)?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

jdrobins2000 13y ago

Is that the equivalent of a "brain dump"? ;)

adrianhoward 13y ago

I don't have an academic library to hand - but I'd guess you would have seen the phrase in the sixties in academia, but it probably didn't have the same meaning as it does today. The roots of the idea of cognitive load - rather than the phrase itself - can be traced back to Miller's seminal (and much misinterpreted) "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" (http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Miller%20GA%20Magical%20Seven%20Psych%20Review%201955.pdf http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Mill...) although he didn't use the term "cognitive load" itself. The term "cognitive load" was certainly used in the 60's and 70's - I remember reading it in papers - but IIRC it didn't really have any formal definition or model at that point. Modern uses of cognitive load track back to John Sweller's development of Cognitive Load Theory in the 80's. It was his work that really popularised it and pushed it out as a well recognised term in things like instructional design and the various disciplines that have morphed into what we now call UX.

noonespecial 13y ago

I saw it mentioned in some very old literature when studying for my pilot's license. (Sometimes as "mental load") so I'd say its been kicked around in aviation since at least the mid 60's.