I believe Mayer and Moreno (2010) hit on something that I have always been fascinated with. Why do people in the same course learn differently? We all have varied capacity to absorb and process information. Things like person experience, interest and purpose affect on level of understanding. I found the assumptions mentioned to also be interesting because they highlight how verbal and visual information need to be presented at the right pace for the learner. Active learning definitely is more challenging. To take the information and apply immediately takes practice. At times, though, I think taking in more verbal and visual actually help reduce cognitive overload. I believe I can see this when learning a language. It is easier to learn when pictures and verbal instruction occur together. Even better, though, is immersion into the language environment in which visual cues may increase verbal retention of the language.
I can see how someone can be overloaded though. I feel overloaded when I have to read many pages of boring text or unfamiliar information with no diagrams or figures in it. I struggle to go back constantly to ensure I understood major concepts. For me to concentrate on learning, I must have a quiet place with no other visual stimulus. If not, I have to go back and try to remember key information before I can go forward and understand the content. The authors illustrated some of the other scenarios in which overload can occur. I have been to meetings when the presenter shows information on the board but talks about something else. It becomes hard to comprehend the information, resulting in many questions to bring visual and verbal back in line.
Some of the solutions are promising for future learning practices. The article mentions off-loading with narration of topics. I believe this is how we learned before we could read and write. Parents would read the story to their young children who remembered after hearing it a few times. Audio books or narratives on the topic may help adults learn quicker. I particularly like creating stories with the information to make it more understandable. It becomes my own little narrative that I can verbalize and visualize.
Mayer, R. E., and Moreno, R. (2003). Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychologist, 38: 1, 43 — 52
Ed's Reflections for IU courses 
3 replies on “Week 5 Blog – Cognitive overload”
I am right there with you. I can’t tell you how many times I am reading an assignment and two pages later I can’t recall a darn thing I read because a song came on and I sang along while reading. What I find interesting, though, is the opposite is true in writing. My writing flows much better when I have music playing in the background. Weird.
I think the idea of cognitive loading a fascinating one. What is the right speed? How much is too much? How little is too little? Just how far apart can the words be from the figure before a brain has to multi-task to take in the info? This is definitely an area that I will be paying attention to in the future.
In following the logic of this theory, I can see how immersion is the most effective learning situation for language, because the entirety of the cognitive load is being used on the same topic, reinforcing learning and streamlining the scaffolding and retention.
-km
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Ed, you provided a lot of cogent insights regarding your experiences with cognitive overload in this week’s blog post. I appreciated this statement from your post: “Things like person experience, interest and purpose affect on level of understanding.” Even if every student in a course comes to the material with the same level of intellectual abilities, their experiences, interest, and purposes will certainly affect the amount that they learn within the course. All of these elements are equally important to the process of learning. As you reiterated in the article by Mayer and Moreno, the methods with which visual and written information is presented to students can greatly affect learning. As instructional designers and educators, we can learn so much from the fields of graphic and user experience design regarding how people process the information presented to them on the page.
Shanna Sanders
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Ed, I also found it interesting how the material from this week explained the differences in how everyone learns and processes information. When learners enter a course or training, they all have different experiences, backgrounds, and prior knowledge. These factors influence how each person in the course or training masters the outcomes.
Another important influence is cognitive capacity. I found Dr. Mayer’s recommendations to be helpful in this area: reduce extraneous processing (provide clear and organized instruction focusing on essential information, foster essential processing (break down information into segmented parts), and foster generative processing (integrate what is being presented with what the learner already knows).
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