Hi, I am back with another part of this review. For those who are reading this first time, I am enrolled in CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion minidegree program and I am trying to review or more precise to say write about the topics I am learning. Let’c quickly take a look at what I am going to cover today.
Following are the topics I am going to cover in this part:
- Cognitive Load
- Eye Gazing Pattern and Online Reading
- Factors that influence Decision making
- How Learning works?
- How Memory works?
But, before I start I want to request you to go through my previous posts if you haven’t yet.
- You can visit this link to catch up part 1 — CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree review [part-1] and,
- This link to catch up part 2 — Minidegree review [part-2]
Now, let’s start.
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load theory was first introduced by John Sweller in 1988. He is an educational psychologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
In Cognitive psychology, the cognitive load is the amount of efforts required to learn or process something. But, why we require efforts?
Because every time we learn something or process some information our mind needs to do a lot of work to make sense of that information and the harder the information we are processing the greater the load we are putting on our mind.
In case of a website, cognitive load could be some element that may effect the users by making it harder to concentrate for user to focus on the core content. Elements like carousals, wrong fonts / color /graphics, unclear copy / value proposition or even poor navigation.
Anything could lead to increase in cognitive load and make it even impossible for a user to go through the content, they might even leave a site for such reasons.
Three types of Cognitive Loads
Intrinsic Cognitive Load — The Intrinsic Cognitive load is related to the complexity of the information at hand. The load apply on the learner on the basis of two factors:
- How hard the task or information at hand is.
- How easily a user process that information.
This means that, the complexity of task / concept and the users understanding of the task / concept are both responsible for factoring Cognitive load.
This type of cognitive load is impossible to eliminate because everyone at some point finds a difficult activity or task that they don’t enjoy doing.
But, it can be reduced significantly by making the activity or task easier for the user. We can easily do that by breaking down the task into simpler steps that anyone can follow.
Extraneous Cognitive Load — If a learning experience is unnecessarily difficult to follow, it can lead to Extraneous Cognitive load.
Which simply means that, this kind of learning experience is taking up all the cognitive resources which could be used for learning or processing the task at hand.
This usually happens because of poor learning experience design or ineffective teaching methods, that directly put negative impact on the learning process by making a task more complex than it should be.
Effective presentation of data can greatly reduce this cognitive load, and helping the learner in staying on track without much efforts on their end.
Germane Cognitive Load — First lets talk about our working memory and Long term memory.
- Working Memory(WM): Its the main memory that we use to process and manipulate data. This memory is highly vulnerable to overloading (because it can only handle up to 4 pieces of information and that too for only up to 10 seconds). And when that happens, we find things difficult to understand, but a short nap can help us in getting back on track. (for people with computers background- you can relate to this memory as RAM in a system.)
- Long Term Memory(LTM): This is the secondary memory of our brain, which is mostly used to store information. This memory never goes out of capacity, means the capacity of this memory is virtually unlimited. But we can’t access all the information of this memory, we only get access to information from LTM on need to need basis. (IT people can relate it with secondary storage of computers.)
But, why I am talking about memory concept of our brain?
Well basically, Germane Cognitive Load is related to how our brain store information in long term memory.
So, our brain basically develop Schema for any kind of information it processes and move that information into the LTM for future reference and use. This schema is a kind of structure for organizing unstructured information in the form of maps or knowledge.
Schema help in organizing vast amount of information we process daily in easy to reference and relate structure. It clubs multiple elements or pieces of information that is related to each other in some way in the form of a map that can be referenced quickly anytime.
Now back to our main topic, Germane Cognitive Load — So, basically its a cognitive load we face while generating schema in our working memory, but this kind of cognitive load is desirable because it helps us in understanding information better, and in improving our knowledge base by developing our long term memory.
Eye Gazing and Online Reading
Eye gazing simply means looking at something with interest, usually for extended times.
Scientists and researchers conducted various studies on eye gazing in the past that explained how user read in an online environment.
According to those studies they group the online reading habit of users into many patterns, most common of those are following:
3 Common online Reading Patterns
- F Pattern: Users online love consuming text content in F shaped patterns. They usually read first few lines or headings on the top, and then they keep scrolling and looking for useful or interesting content by just gazing through the first few words on every line or paragraph.
- Layer cake pattern: Users fall in this pattern, when they give more importance to headings and sub headings, and relatively give less consideration to the body of the text content. They might look at the body of the content when they find interesting work in the headings. People show this tendency to quickly find what they are looking for, to save their time and to avoid distraction.
- Spotted pattern: Users who show layer case scan pattern, quickly move to spotted pattern when they find something interesting in the content. Here, they give attention to some area of content which looks like they are reading only spots of a para, hence the name.
Factors that influence decision making
Decision making is the process that helps us in coming to a conclusion by considering the presented facts, our understanding on the situation and devising the alternative resolutions. This directly or indirectly help us in forming our choices and likes.
Psychologists grouped 4 main mental processes that influence our decisions, and they are as follows:
- Cognitive Biases: A cognitive bias is a kind of error in our thinking process that we usually do when processing and understanding the information around us and this mainly effect our decisions and judgement.
- Memories: Our memories play an important role in our decision making process, we love to repeat our successes or wins, and we avoid repeating our mistakes or failures. We take help from our past experiences for similar situations and these experiences play a major role in our future decisions.
- Reason: For our daily decision making, we take the help of our reasoning. We develop many hypotheses frequently everyday based on the information available to us including our memories.
- Emotions: Contrary to the popular fact, decisions are more emotional than rational. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, while studying people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions were generated, found that they all are unable to make decisions, not even the common daily decisions like deciding to tea or coffee.
How Learning works?
I am going to discuss 3 unique learning processes that I learned:
- Classical conditioning: In simple words, classical conditioning means learning through association. In other words, two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response. It was discovered by Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, and is also known as Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlov practically showed this with the classic example of Pavlov’s Classic dog feeding Experiment.
- Operant Conditioning: It is also know as instrumental conditioning. Operant conditioning is a method of learning in which we give reward for every good behavior and punishment for bad behavior. Most common example of operant conditioning is school going kids, parents & teachers usually give gifts or other things for encouraging good behavior like focusing on learning and getting good grades, while children who don’t show such a behavior gets punishment.
- Observational Learning: Here the learning occurs through copying others actions. A classic example of observational learning is The Bobo Doll experiment by psychologist Albert Bandura.
How Memory works?
Like any modern storage system there are three major processes involves in the working of memory:
- Encoding: In this process, the raw information is interlinked and organized into schema.
- Storage: After the encoding process completes, the schema is transferred into long term memory away from our consciousness for safe storage and referencing.
- Retrieval: Here this process help us in referencing the stored information by retrieving it into the working memory where we consciously analyze this data for further processing and decision making.
Apart from this the memories can be of different length and depth, some memories can be as brief as of 2–3 seconds and some lasts even few months, also some memories can be just a rough image of an event while other could be detailed as something is happening right now.
I hope whoever read this find it useful. I avoid trying to associate these concepts with websites and digital marketing because I think that psychology is natural and should apply to everything, you can learn these concepts and use them as per your context. While some concepts and ideas are very contextual and can’t be used everywhere, but some are raw and natural and can be applied in many real life situations. The minidegree program I am going through is more focused on websites and digital marketing area, and I am enjoying it, but still I want to keep this end open for other applications and contexts.
Thank you for reading till end, please do check other parts of this review series. Have a wonderful day. :)
