Cognitive Load
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What is cognitive load?
Cognitive load is a term that refers to the state of mentally attending to one or more tasks peripheral to the task at hand. This means that in total, the amount of things one is keeping track of is increased relative to a condition without an additional task. This can have the effect of reducing optimal performance, because one cannot completely concentrate on the target task.
Phenomena studied in the context of cognitive load
- Aggression
- Attitude Change
- Stereotyping
- Please add more here, etc.
Effects of Cognitive Load
Cognitive Load and Attitude Change
Cognitive Load Manipulations
Among other things, this would be a useful page for a catalog of cognitive load manipulations to go. If you know of different cognitive load manipulations that aren't already on this page please add them, and a citation to one publication where it was used if possible.
- a summary of many distraction manipulations and how they affected persuasion attempts is presented in a table in Petty & Brock (1981), which is Chapter 3 in the book Cognitive Responses in Persuasion, edited by Petty, Ostrom, & Brock.
- vocally monitoring flashing lights. this manipulation was used in (Osterhouse & Brock 1970). by varying the rate at which the lights flashed, different levels of distraction were achieved.
- monitor flashing Xs on a screen a few feet away and record the position on a written form. used in (Petty, Wells, & Brock 1976). distraction level was manipulated by increasing the rate of flashing Xs.
- replacing the video of a persuasive appeal while keeping the soundtrack the same across conditions. thus those in the "replaced" condition had additional visual stimuli that were not related to the message content. from (Festinger & Maccoby 1964).
- static added to recording of a message. from (Silverman & Regula 1968)
- adding the number of letters in the names of digits (i.e. "one plus one" = 6) while listening to a message. used in (Zimbardo, Snyder, Gold, & Gurwitz 1970)
- tracking musical tone changes while performing another task (Skitka, Mullen, Griffin, Hutchinson & Chamberlin, 2002, JPSP.
