Emotions and Cognitive Load

Back in 2017 I published The Emotional Learner. It wasn’t a revolutionary book by any means and, with hindsight, there are many areas I would have excluded or added. One area that’s conspicuously absent is cognitive load, despite emotions having an important role to play.

The educational landscape at the time was mildly fractious, with a new breed of teacher seemingly discovering cognitive psychology for the first time. This enthusiasm was welcomed by some, but others found it all a little frustrating. Cognitive explanations of learning do appear quite reductionist at first sight, not helped perhaps by the separation of learning into cognitive and non-cognitive factors. Of course, few aspects of learning are truly non-cognitive - every aspect of human existence involves the ability to think. To attend. To remember.

Emotional states are perhaps thought by some to be non-cognitive, yet the processes involved in memory and learning are also the same ones involved in emotion. This false dichotomy leads, perhaps, the cognitive-centred teachers to reject the role of emotions in learning. Learning is about memory, after all. Learning is also about the damands placed upon the learners limited cognitive compacities (in a nutshell, cognitive load).

In his 2019 review of twenty years of Cognitive Load Theory, John Sweller explores several avenues of further investigation, including emotions, stress and uncertainty (the main topics of The Emotional Learner).

Cognitive Load: A Re-cap.

Cognitive load can be defined as ‘the relationship between cognitive demands placed on the user by a task and the user’s cognitive resources’ (Palinko et al, 2010), but see my article here for a more in-depth discussion. 

However, it’s not just the demands of the task that increase cognitive load but also, what Choi et al. (2014) describes as, environmental causal factors. Stress and uncertainty, it’s proposed, add to load and consume much needed resources. 

In  Becoming Buoyant I addressed cognitive load in relation to academic buoyancy, a model developed by Andrew Martin, a colleague of Sweller at the University of New South Wales. Martin has since shifted his emphasis towards academic buoyancy’s application to the reduction of load, culminating in Load Reduction Instruction, a model of instructional design that sits nicely beside Sweller’s own Cognitive Load Theory.

But how does all this knit together? Choi proposes three types of effects of the physical learning environment on cognitive load and learning: Cognitive effects, physiological effects and affective affects. 

Those familiar with The Emotional Learner and Becoming Buoyant will recognise these terms. Cognitive effects correspond to uncertainty, while physiological effects would include stress. These, in turn, correspond to the control and composure elements of the 5Cs of academic buoyancy. Affective effects would include emotions, particularly the influence of positive and negative affectual states. However, I much prefer Pekrun’s classification of activating and deactivating emotions, for reasons I describe in The Emotional Learner.

Cognition and Emotion

From a neuroscience standpoint, brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotions aren’t all that different to those that give rise to cognition. They are also processed in a similar way, differing only in terms of the inputs into the brain’s cortical-based general neural networks. It then follows that if cognitions influence cognitive load during a learning task, so do emotions. 

We certainly know that more anxious people perform worse on formal tests than less anxious people, including tests of general intelligence. Research has also discovered that cortisol (the so-called stress hormone) influences both memory consolidation and memory retrieval, only in different directions. If emotions influence memory generally then one would assume that this includes cognitive load.

Stress, emotions & uncertainty in working memory

According to Moran (2016), stress, emotions and uncertainty may restrict the capacity of working memory by competing with task-relevant processes, so learning is best supported by attempting to prevent such states. Or develop strategies to minimise their influence. This is certainly the case in education generally, but has a bigger impact on professional and vocational tasks such as those carried out by doctors and nurses or the military. 

Such professions require rapid decision making, often in the absence of complete information. Furthermore, medical staff will regularly face emotional situations during the course of their work, so they require the ability to successfully regulate emotional states that might hamper their ability. 

We can’t exclude these emotions, so we have to discover a practical means to deal with them that won’t increase load because all these situations will increase the load on those all important cognitive resources. In the language of Cognitive Load Theory, if emotion, stress and anxiety are part and parcel of the task to be learned, they’ll contribute to intrinsic cognitive load, the mental effort associated with the specific task.

One study, for example, explored the impact of heightened emotions in medical professionals tasked with recognising heart murmurs. Participants with emotional states categorised as invigorating reported increased cognitive load, while those categorised as tranquil reported decreased cognitive load. 

The study was, however, correlational and used a subjective measure of cognitive load (Fraser et al., 2012). Another study, this time by Um et al. (also from 2012) found that inducing positive emotions during a learning task decreased the perceived difficulty of the task (a possible decrease in extraneous load). But inducing positive emotions before the learning task increased the mental effort participants invested during the task.

Emotions and Cognitive Load: Possible Explanations 

How emotions influence cognitive load is a topic of some debate. In a 2019 literature review, Plass and Kalyuga identified four possible explanations.

1. Emotions represent extraneous cognitive load and compete for resources. Within the Cognitive Load Theory paradigm, extraneous load describes elements that are unrelated to the learning task, yet still compete for limited resources. Anxiety isn’t going to help us complete the task, but it’s still going take up resources that could be better used to do so.

2. Emotions may affect intrinsic cognitive load. This is especially the case when emotion regulation forms part of the learning outcome.

3. Emotions influence motivation. Motivation effects mental effort, so there is going to be an impact on germane load, or the integration of new information into currently stored schemas.

4. Emotions affect memory by broadening and narrowing cognitive resources. This can be explained through the Broaden and Build framework proposed by Fredrickson and explained in detail in The Emotional Learner. The gist of the model is that positive emotions broaden our ability via the formation of thought-action repertoires, while negative emotions (e.g. anxiety) narrow it. When we are under positive affect, information stored in long-term memory is effortlessly recalled without increasing load, yet under negative affect, extraneous load is increased.

These four possible explanations certainly imply that there are other factors, besides task or instructional related ones, that lead to an increase in cognitive load. These findings may help to identify strategies that can reduce environmental causal factors. 

One particular method investigated by Sonal Arora from Imperial College London looked at how surgeons could use imagination and mental practice prior to performing a procedure to decrease anxiety. The emphasis here was on building and improving coping strategies that could then be applied in the future, what I’ve described elsewhere as positive psychological capital.

The relationship between cognitive and emotion is well understood (the peer reviewed journal Cognition and Emotion was first published in 1987). Indeed, studies into this relationship are older than cognitive psychology itself.