A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload

Abstract:
Today's workplace is a complex knowledge environment in which the flow of information is mediated by an ill understood array of technologies, at-hand resources, and shifting teams of people. Few of us believe, any longer, that office work is straightforward and procedural. We recognize that people engage in many tasks at once, often in ways that cause interference. People interact with each other and with their tools in little known ways; they constantly develop work-arounds to standard operating procedures, and their primary work space is not confined to the physical region within arm's reach, but is a distributed cluster of 2D and 3D spaces near key resources, computers, telephones and bookcases. Indeed modern workspaces now include virtual spaces -- customized computer `desktops' and applications that have their own worlds of organizational structure, information space, and workflow requirements. Given this complexity of tasks and spaces it is no wonder that workers have trouble effectively managing their office activities and coping with information. Email, telephone calls, electronic discussion groups, websites, pushed intranet news, letters and memos, faxes, stick-ems, calendars, pagers, and, of course, physical conversations and meetings, are just a few of the communicative events that bombard today's knowledge worker. The upshot is a workspace of increased complexity, saturated with multi-tasking, interruption, and profound information overload. The effect of this cognitive overload at a social level is tension with colleagues, loss of job satisfaction, and strained personal relationships. (IFTF/Gallup [97] study of Fortune 1000 workers.)

To understand how people handle this bewildering matrix of information and activity spaces typical of modern workspaces requires close attention to the fine grain of interaction. Given the prevalence of multi-tasking and interruption: How do we switch attention from one task to another? How do we maintain control over our multiple inquiries? What do we find intrusive, distracting, or annoying? What are the effects of interruption and what sort of cognitive strategies have people developed to minimize their consequences? There is a large body of psychological literature on attention – both single and dual task attention. But the issues that concern us here, lie as much in the interaction between agent and environment as in the agent's cognitive make-up itself – an area experimental psychologists have spent less time exploring. When people adapt to their environments they not only adapt internally by altering mental processes and behavior, they also change the very environment posing the adaptive challenge. If we are to develop theories of information overload, multi-tasking, distraction, and interruption – all key components of a general theory of cognitive overload -- we will have to understand this co-evolution. We will need to understand how people dynamically manage their interaction, how they are cognitively coupled to their environments, and how they structure workflow by using the environment as a cognitive ally.

In this paper I will take a first look at some issues that arise when we set out to design real life environments in which multi-tasking, interruption and cognitive overload are the order of the day. So many specific areas for research are opened by these topics there is space to explore just two:

What is cognitive overload?
How can an understanding of the cognitive workflow in environments lead us to design better workspaces?