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

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.