Your decisions just get "noisier" or inconsistent when you have more on your mind. It is not because a higher cognitive load causes a genuine change in your preference for unhealthy food. It is a bit like choosing the fruit salad over the cake under normal circumstances, but switching to the cake when you are cognitively overloaded. Increased cognitive load made them switch. ![]() The key finding was not that increasing cognitive load made people inherently more risk-seeking (tending to choose A) or risk-averse (B), but that it simply made them more inconsistent in their choices. Participants made these choices both with their attention focused solely on the gambles, and, in another part of the experiment, while also keeping track of sequences of letters played to them via headphones. They asked participants to choose between pairs of gambles, such as:Ī) 42% chance of $14 and 58% chance of $85, orī) 8% chance of $24 or 92% chance of $44. In another study, Swiss researchers used the monitoring task to examine the impact of cognitive load on risky choices. More and more decisions take their tollīut when tasks become more taxing, decision making can start to deteriorate. Presumably they divided their attention between keeping track of the simple sequence, and rehearsing the numbers. ![]() In our study, participants who had to learn the sequence and monitor the numbers made just as many successful predictions, on average, as those who only had to learn the sequence. When the cognitive load is not too great, people can successfully "divide and conquer" (by paying attention to one task first). Think of this increase in cognitive load as a bit like trying to remember a phone number while compiling your shopping list. In one study, we asked participants to predict a sequence of simple events (whether a green or red square would appear at the top or bottom of a screen) while keeping track of a stream of numbers between the squares. To measure the effects of cognitive load on decision-making, researchers vary the amount of information people are given, then look at the effects. Most people find it very hard to remember more than a few at once. Think of remembering a phone or bank account number. ![]() These ideas grew into research on " working memory": there are limits on the number of mental actions or operations we can carry out. We are forced to attend selectively to a portion of all the information available to our senses at a given time. Researchers have been looking into our limited capacity for cognition or attention for decades.Įarly research described a "bottleneck" through which information passes. We are trying to think about too many things at once, and our brains can only cope with a finite amount of information. One way to think about these extra decisions we're making in isolation is in terms of "cognitive load". So what's going on? We're increasing our cognitive load ![]() What shall I have for breakfast? What shall I wear? Do I hassle the kids to brush their teeth? Is it safe to nip out for milk? Should I download the COVIDSafe app? Is it OK to wear my pyjamas in a Zoom meeting?Īll of these kinds of decisions are in addition to the familiar, everyday ones. All those tiny decisions we make every day are multiplying and taking their toll. But we may be getting tired for another reason.
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