Imagine you’re in the first class of the semester, excited to learn something new. But unfortunately, as soon as your professor begins lecturing, you question if this is a course you can bear for another twelve weeks—not due to your lack of passion for the material, but how the material is being presented. The slides are full of text, without color or images. Your professor is rambling about something in her personal life. And your classmate is on his iPad watching something that has absolutely nothing to do with the class.

This all-too-familiar situation illustrates just one way that cognitive load theory is apparent in educational settings. Cognitive load theory (CLT) suggests that there are three types of cognitive loads we process when engaged in learning something new: 

1. Intrinsic cognitive load: How easy or difficult the content presented inherently is to learn, which stays relatively constant. In our example, this would be the material presented in the first lecture of your new course.
2. Extraneous cognitive load: How easy or difficult it is to learn the content considering the environment in which it is presented, which varies. In our example, this would be your teacher being off-topic, the text-heavy slides, and your classmate on his iPad. 
3. Germane cognitive load: The mental resources required to fit the material into schemas, our cognitive frameworks for organizing and interpreting information. In our example, this would be how challenging it felt to sort and store the new knowledge from the lecture in your head, considering its unfocused presentation.

John Sweller, the educational psychologist who proposed CLT, originally suggested that the total cognitive load is the sum of intrinsic, extraneous, and germane loads when a learner is engaged in learning.⁵ He believed that the overarching goal of CLT is to lessen the amount of extraneous load by changing the way instructions are presented when learning occurs. 

For example, in that lecture hall, let’s say the intrinsic load wasn’t too much since the material was an inherently easier topic for the introduction class. However, the extraneous and germane loads were quite overbearing—the delivery was clouded by many different distractions (extraneous) which made it awfully difficult to apply this information to your previous knowledge (germane), despite it seeming simple at face value. According to Sweller, this would mean that the overall cognitive load of the lecture was quite heavy.

It’s important to note that the three types of cognitive loads are rooted in different stages of our memory system:²

• First, our sensory memory helps us pick up initial sensory information. It filters out unnecessary details in our environments and then communicates the important ones to our working memory for further processing.
• Our working memory is responsible for processing intrinsic and extraneous cognitive loads. Working memory has traditionally been theorized to be capable of processing between five to nine “bits” of information at a time—which today has been updated to be just four.^3,4 When our working memory is active, our brain then decides what to throw away and what to pass along to long-term memory. 
• Finally, our long-term memory handles germane cognitive loads by sorting the information it wants to keep into schemas to help organize and apply the information later on. Schemas have a “use it or lose it” element, where the more a schema is grown and recalled, the easier it is to refer to it in the future.

Although so far we have focused on a hypothetical college student experiencing CLT, it is key to apply this theory to other demographics of learners as well. While it may be intuitive to then think of other age groups—such as children who still have developing working memories, or the elderly who have declining memory capacities—other demographic features like socioeconomic status are relevant to CLT too. Some research has found that those with less financial resources may experience impairments in decision-making, perhaps as poverty places higher cognitive loads on them, especially extraneous loads that might lessen their ability to focus.⁶

Intrinsic Cognitive Load: The innate difficulty of processing given information, without considering how it is provided. This stays the same irrespective of extraneous and germane loads but may change over time depending on who the learner is and how much they know.

Extraneous Cognitive Load: How the information is presented in an environment and how easy or hard it is for a learner to make sense of it. Extraneous loads also vary from person to person.

Germane Cognitive Load: How much effort is required to apply memory and the intelligence used to make schemas for permanent storage. Germane load lessens as schemas are cemented into memory. 

Sensory Memory: The brief retention of sensory information such as sights and sounds before it is either discarded or passed to working memory. It acts as a filter, allowing only relevant stimuli to enter further cognitive processing.

Working Memory: A limited-capacity system responsible for temporarily holding and processing information before it is either forgotten or encoded into long-term memory, with capacity typically limited to about four chunks of information.

Long-Term Memory: The memory system responsible for storing information indefinitely, organizing it into schemas that facilitate retrieval and application of knowledge. The more frequently a schema is activated, the easier it becomes to recall and use the associated information in future tasks.

Schemas: Cognitive frameworks that help organize and interpret information. Schemas are developed over time as individuals encounter and process related information, allowing for quicker and more efficient retrieval of knowledge when needed. 

Element Interactivity: The extent to which different elements interact with each other when a learner processes information on a continuum. Element interactivity is low when a concept may be learned alone without considering other concepts. Meanwhile, element interactivity is high when many elements must be understood and processed by the learner simultaneously.⁷

Split-Attention Effect: A learning effect where a learner’s attention becomes mentally “split” when two or more pieces of information from the same resource are taken in. This effect is intrinsic to instructional materials that have an ineffective design.⁸

Redundancy Effect: A learning effect where the repetition of information impedes instead of enhances learning. This effect has been linked to the split-attention effect, such as with reading comprehension.⁹ 

Modality Effect: A learning effect where a mix of presentation mediums, or “modes” (e.g., visual and auditory), is more effective for helping learners interpret information compared to a single medium (e.g., only visual or auditory).¹⁰ With CLT, this may consider our text-heavy, pictureless slide as a single mode that is not as effective compared to a slide with a diagram or multiple modes. 

Decades before cognitive learning theory was formally established, cognitive science—the field that laid the groundwork for the theory’s development—was established in the 1950s. One key figure to all of this is George Armitage Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology and first thinkers to propose that humans’ working memory has limits to what it is capable of holding.³ A magic number every psychology student hears at some point is seven (plus or minus two). That’s the number that Miller’s experimental results suggested that human short-term memory can only hold at a time. (Although, more recently, the “magic number” has been updated to be four.⁴) Such numbers and experiments of Miller’s paved the way for psychology to investigate human memory types and how well they function. 

In 1974, researchers Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch introduced the working memory model—a critical idea for the later development of cognitive learning theory.¹¹ The authors discovered that working memory is limited in how much information it can hold for a short period of time while simultaneously performing mental operations on that information. This theory created a blueprint for CLT in terms of the multiple types of memory involved: sensory, working, and long-term. The working memory model was the first to differentiate between short-term memory, which simply holds information, and working memory, which holds and processes information.

Cognitive load theory was officially proposed in the 1980s when educational psychologist John Sweller conducted a study on problem-solving, investigating how the delivery of instructions impacts learning. In particular, Sweller was curious about how to intentionally design instructions to lessen the amount of cognitive load on the learner. Sweller hoped to develop guidelines that would allow teachers or other educators to present information in a way that enhances learning, rather than impedes it.
A core aspect in the evolution of CLT—and our understanding of cognitive loads themselves—that Sweller devised were the two factors involved in learning.¹⁴ Causal factors such as the environment, task, and learner have an impact on cognitive load, in contrast to assessment factors such as mental load, mental effort, and performance that are impacted by cognitive load.

Sweller called the complexity between causal and assessments “element interactivity,” whereby the first two types of cognitive loads were born: intrinsic and extraneous.¹⁴ In his evolution of CLT, Sweller said that element interactivity has to do with the number of concepts needed to learn something—it is low when there is only one concept that needs to be understood on its own, and high when many concepts need to be understood in relation to each other.

Sweller continues to develop and update CLT up to this day. In 2024, he released a paper on cognitive load and individual differences in learners.15 Here, Sweller takes more of an evolutionary psychology point-of-view: our environments and biology over time have greatly influenced our cognitive abilities. Learning itself has evolved in humans over time, leading to vast individual differences. Sweller leaves us with more to think about, like how we acquire knowledge is a key cognitive element (perhaps the only one, he says) that continues to be dynamic and change with how individuals learn.

John Sweller 

An Australian educational psychologist, famous for creating cognitive load theory—one of the most cited theories in the educational psychology field. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales. He earned his PhD from the University of Adelaide’s Department of Psychology in 1972 as well as a B.A. (Honors) from the same school in 1969.

George Armitage Miller 

An American psychologist who was one of the founders of both cognitive psychology and cognitive science. He is most known for his paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” on the capacity of short-term memory—which influenced theories such as CLT relative to working memory. Miller won the National Medal of Science for his work.

Alan Baddeley

A British psychologist famous for his work on memory, notably his model of working memory in the 1970s with Graham Hitch. He has been inducted into the Order of the British Empire, and as a Fellow of the Royal Society for his achievements in psychology. Baddeley completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1962 prior to becoming a professor of psychology at the University of York.   

Graham Hitch

A British psychologist famous for his work on memory along with Baddeley for their model of working memory in the 1970s. Before ending up at the University of York as a professor alongside Baddeley, Hitch initially pursued physics during his undergrad before focusing on experimental and cognitive psychology in grad school. Hitch completed his PhD in 1972 at Cambridge with a focus on memory organization and recall.

One of the worst feelings as a learner is feeling overwhelmed by the material presented. Luckily, CLT continues to find ways to mitigate that feeling, helping us understand what combinations of the different types of loads may lead to such. CLT may be seen in a variety of educational settings when it comes to course design and delivery, especially when determining strategies to avoid cognitive overload. 

Given its popularity, CLT comes with its fair share of criticism. Both this specific theory, along with the greater field of cognitive psychology in general, share a common struggle: we cannot observe most if not all of cognition—after all, it's all in our minds. So, how can we measure all of these mental operations?

With this in mind, in 2009, de Jong discussed how this major limitation specifically applies to CLT in the realm of educational research and instructional design. In particular, he cited the key problem of not being able to measure cognitive load directly.¹⁸ The author highlighted how many CLT studies use post-test results to make their claims, arguing that the post-test cognitive loads may be lower than the actual cognitive loads before doing such tests. There is further nuance to CLT measurement problems, according to de Jong, like how self-report scales are one of the most used methods for measurement. This speaks to the irony behind researching CLT: when we are overloaded and trying to measure and understand CLT, we may be faulty in our own reporting of mental experiences. 

Jong has other problems with the conceptual aspects of CLT too—and he’s not the only one. This researcher, as well as Kalyuga (2011), wrote separate criticisms yet found similar issues with the different types of loads being distinct from each other, or if all three categories are needed at all.19 While Jong finds the definitions between the three loads blurry, Kalyuga extends this by saying that CLT may be redundant as intrinsic and germane loads are too hard to distinguish. The author points out that germane load was added based on theory alone, instead of empirical results like intrinsic and extraneous. 

Going back to our idea of schemas and their immaterial nature, even conceiving of these concept-building mechanisms in our heads is quite abstract. These types of loads are even a step further in terms of how abstract and intangible they feel. How then can we attempt to measure something so deeply entrenched in our cognition?

Sweller has responded to his critics by updating CLT in 2019.²⁰ The CLT originator heard his critics loud and clear, where the germane load was amended to be a separate source of cognitive load. Instead of the previous idea that germane load always adds to the total cognitive load, Sweller reconceived the role of germane load to redistribute working memory resources from extraneous to intrinsic situations. 

An update to germane loads was well-needed—after all, the mental effort humans now put into different tasks is changing faster than ever before. This leads to questions surrounding how recent technological advancements such as AI may impact the size of different cognitive loads.

Cognitive Load or Cognitive Overload?

A key assumption of CLT is the desire to minimize the amount of extraneous load by trying to determine how information can be presented in the most fluent way possible so the learner can follow instructions easily. Since Sweller came up with CLT, the possible types of extraneous loads have increased drastically. One way to think of this is to ask yourself: what else do students actually “do” when trying to study? Any student of the past decade knows that the answer is not “just studying”—there are often social media notifications,  music-listening, and other students around to distract. The amount of information we take in is simply overwhelming, an experience sometimes referred to as information overload.

One study investigated the multitasking of postsecondary students who were doing homework over three-hour sessions, especially focused on social media multitasking.²¹ Over these study sessions, students had some interesting extraneous loads arise: 73 minutes of music, and 35 various distractions of six seconds or more on average over three hours. 

Calderwood and colleagues found that the more motivation and self-efficacy a student had to do homework, the less multitasking occurred in their study. An experiment like this may be connected to CLT in considering extraneous loads that are both auditory (the music) and visual (social media notifications). According to this research, germane loads may not be the only part of CLT that needs a revamping as extraneous loads such as these distractors continue to evolve in our digital age.

The CLT Lens on Fake News and Social Media Fatigue

With the landscape of cognitive loads continuing to evolve, two central sources of extraneous loads online today are misinformation on social media. Surely, Sweller could not account for the impact of not only the internet but social media’s influence on CLT when the theory was born. Yet, research in the 2010s has attempted to integrate CLT into these modern information problems. Looking at the time period during the pandemic, Islam et al. explored a cognitive load perspective on misinformation and social media fatigue.²²

These authors aimed to explore the possible link of social media fatigue to misinformation online and CLT, as well as how individual differences (e.g., personal attributes, motivational aspects) may play a part. In April 2020, 433 social media data from users’ responses in Bangladesh were collected via a survey, which integrated various constructs from CLT to ask questions on social media use. What the research showed is that some theoretical outcomes of CLT, such as information overload, increase the overall cognitive load that may be related to social media fatigue. 

Of course, a prominent fraction of this overload may indeed be misinformation. Islam et al. believe that CLT is an all-encompassing theory that can tie these factors of misinformation and social media fatigue together. In this sense, CLT can be adapted to these contemporary issues with new types of “online” loads—providing us with a blueprint to sort the distracting or unreliable bits of information, while sifting through what is needed. This study should make us aware of all types of overload to be more wary of, such as communication, social, and connection, to name a few.

Remaining Vigilant In The Era of Information Overload

At TDL, the number of decisions we make daily is no secret—we know it's a lot. When thinking about CLT, there are always many extraneous loads going on, yet we often need to ask ourselves nowadays which of these loads are reliable pieces of information. Though during COVID-19 there were challenges like fake news, there are solutions on how to be aware of spotting such information. This article outlines how humans can sift through misinformation, without getting too tired in the process.

Watch Out For These Cognitive Biases When Working From Home

Students aren’t the only ones grappling with cognitive loads like distractions when doing tasks—so are full-time employees, especially when working from home. This article outlines a handful of cognitive biases that may arise when working remotely in your home, and how to make daily adjustments to be more efficient in your professional life.

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