The Influence of Manipulating and Accentuating Task-Irrelevant Information on Learning Efficiency: Insights for Cognitive Load Theory

The paper endorses Cognitive Load Theory and offers insights into the characterization of the mechanisms underlying extraneous cognitive load and their impact on basic learning. Students were asked to learn associations between eight base-code words and eight digits, based on an example, and to rapidly apply their new knowledge in a test section. Two groups of 60 university students participated in two experiments. The study was implemented as two distinct experiments, one using color names (e.g., blue, yellow) and the other using color-related word concepts (e.g., sky, banana) for stimulation. Each experiment had two conditions that manipulated the location and salience of task-irrelevant color information (extraneous cognitive load) and its congruity with the digits’ corresponding base-code words. Findings indicated extraneous cognitive load has the potential to both sustain and undermine learning processes by varying the overall cognitive load, with gains and costs in learning efficiency resulting from essentially different processing scenarios.