Managing the load on a reader’s mind

As Jan van Dalen opened in a previous issue [1], ‘It is every Editor’s dream that articles in ‘‘their’’ journal serve a wide population of interested readers.’ But how do we succeed in producing such articles? What is of crucial importance is that an article provides answers to the questions ‘What is new?’ and ‘What is in there for me?’, and that it does not comprise too many elements that distract from these core answers. Cognitive load theory [2] provides a framework for how to do exactly that. In cognitive load theory, learning is the gradual development and refinement of schemata (i.e., existing knowledge) in longterm memory, and processing new information—information that is not yet part of these schemata—requires working memory load or cognitive load [3]. The extent to which an article presents new information depends on the level of expertise of the individual reader. For example, experts who have studied the human brain for quite some years tend to have very elaborate schemata of the human brain or at least of particular regions of the brain. Novice students, who have barely read or seen anything about the human brain, on the contrary, have virtually no schemata about the human brain or particular brain regions at all. If we wish to serve our entire reading audience, we need to take care that there is something new in our articles for both groups but that we do not overload the novice readers. Explaining core assumptions and choices in sufficient detail is one way of managing this so-called intrinsic cognitive load [4] on the reader’s mind, providing references where readers can find more details and fill gaps in their knowledge is another way. If we fail to explain core assumptions and choices, or fail to provide accessible references on core issues about which we feel we cannot expand too much in our article (for instance, due to wording limits), we may overload potentially interested but novice readers, and we may lose their interest. Meanwhile, if we fail to provide meaningful answers to the questions ‘What is new?’ and ‘What is in there for