Cognitive load
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load describes demands placed on limited working-memory resources while a person learns or performs a task.
Psychology, behavioral science, perception, human computer interaction, and usability principles explained for working designers.
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Cognitive load
Cognitive load describes demands placed on limited working-memory resources while a person learns or performs a task.
Interaction
For aimed movement, acquisition time tends to increase with target distance and decrease with target size along the movement axis.
Interaction
In practiced choice-reaction tasks, response time tends to grow with the information uncertainty of the possible stimulus-response alternatives.
Gestalt
Elements placed nearer one another tend to be perceived as related, especially when the spacing pattern is consistent and other cues do not override it.
Memory
Organizing separate items into meaningful, familiar groups can make information easier to perceive, rehearse, and retrieve.
Decision making
Cognitive bias is an umbrella term for systematic patterns in judgment that can depart from a task-relevant normative standard.
Interaction
Rapid, meaningful system feedback helps sustain an interactive rhythm; the often-cited 400 ms value is historical guidance, not a universal boundary.
Interaction
Every meaningful action should produce timely, perceivable feedback that accurately communicates the resulting system state.
Mental models
People bring expectations learned from other products, so familiar conventions often reduce the effort needed to begin using a new interface.
Gestalt
Elements enclosed by the same visible boundary tend to be perceived as a group, even when other grouping cues compete.
Gestalt
Elements joined by a visible continuous connection tend to be perceived as one unit or as more strongly related than unconnected elements.
Memory
Immediate-memory performance is limited and can improve through meaningful recoding, but Miller’s ‘seven plus or minus two’ is not a universal UI item limit.
Usability
When explanations or designs account for the same requirements equally well, prefer the one that depends on fewer unnecessary assumptions.
Mental models
People often begin productive action immediately instead of investing first in broad instruction that might improve later efficiency.
Usability
Accept safe, unambiguous input variation where useful and produce predictable output, while rejecting ambiguity that threatens security or interoperability.
Cognitive load
Progressive disclosure presents the information and controls needed now, then reveals additional detail when the user asks or the task reaches it.