Cognitive Overload

Seven dwarfs … it’s just too many! I can never remember them all. I know that if I focused on only them during the film then I’d remember their names, but initially, seven is just too many for me to remember.

Too much information

If an advert, explainer animation, or website piece were to list seven benefits, the chances are that, like Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Happy, Doc, Bashful and Sleepy, the viewer won’t take anything away with them and that’s because we can only cognitively process a finite amount of information.

How it works

When we are subjected to a piece of information, our sensory memory clocks it. It then goes into our working memory to be organised, recognised, and integrated into our existing knowledge (if it needs to be). For us to integrate it successfully, we need to engage in active cognitive processes to build new networks in our minds.

However, there’s a lot of information to process out there – so, we’re wired to focus on detecting change. We’re not conscious of the huge amounts of information our brain is processing, we’re only aware of the information our mind feels we need to know (and remember).

“Our minds are designed to seek patterns, and when something feels askew, we take notice and become guarded. That’s because humans have evolved to avoid harm and today, we approach brands with instinctive trepidation”, writes Douglas Van Praet (2012, p. 195), “Simple, uncluttered, clear-cut stories and environments work best because of their ability to soothe and assuage our slothful, critical, and often suspicious minds”.

“Cognitive misers”

We are cognitive misers (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Most people can maintain five to seven “chunks” of information in their working memory at a given time (Mayer, 2009). As we process most of our information through the auditory channel and the visual channel, our minds are also having to choose which one takes priority.

Are you feeling overloaded?

It’s not difficult to overload our minds. When presented with a piece of content, we’re not only processing the sights and sounds, but we’re also processing different words through different channels, we’re dealing with the distractions around us and, if it’s a piece that contains visuals, sounds or moving images, we’re having to process these too.

A quick example

We created a piece for The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) whilst I was at Curveball. In one section of the final draft we were finding that the viewer couldn’t process the information being given to them. We spent a long time breaking the whole thing apart and eventually found that in a key area of the animation the sound effects crept over the first and last syllables of a single keyword. As our brains jump to conclusions based on limited information, in that short space of time the brain didn’t have enough information to process the keyword. When we shifted the voiceover so that the sound effect fell in the centre of the word, we found that the piece worked because the brain was given enough information to “hear” the word and process its meaning.

Who cares?

Well, when we’re overloading, we are in danger of nothing getting committed to our existing knowledge, and thus of remembering nothing. We’re also in danger of affecting our audience’s buying decisions.

Our minds like things that are simple to understand. A positive emotional reaction is triggered by fluent processing (Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003) and our minds can then misattribute this to a liking of the brand. Equally, negative cognitive responses to a complex idea can impact either the acceptance or the rejection of the message itself (McQuarrie & Mick, 1996).

“It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.” (Kahneman, 2011, p. 87)

The takeaway

Words, concepts, visuals, movement, sounds, statistics … it’s very tempting to cram content with too much information. But you need to show restraint.

Create a hierarchy for your piece. Ask yourself what the most important thing is and then give the audio and visual channels the same information to re-enforce the key message.

In short:

Be less …

Slowly walkin’ down the hall

Faster than a cannonball.

(Gallagher, 1996)

and more …

He was a boy
She was a girl
Can I make it any more obvious?

(Lavigne, 2002)

Keep it simple. Think about how easily your audience’s brains can process and understand what is being communicated.

Want more?

The irony of this post is that there is so much to remember that it will cause an overload. See below for more …

• Studies have found that if your product is new to the market, then using a metaphor rather than a narrative created a cognitive overload. Whereas, if the audience already had prior knowledge of the product, then use of a metaphor helped cognition (Bertele et al., 2020).

• Using slightly more ambiguous metaphors created pleasure because the viewer was compensated for their extra cognitive effort (Berlyne, 1971; McQuarrie & Mick, 1996).

• Our emotional state can affect recall. If we’re feeling anxious then this too can reduce our working memory capacity.

• To complicate matters further, different words, for example, use different pathways. If the word is concrete (cake, flower, puppy) then it goes through the visual channel. If it’s abstract (love, success, luxury) then it goes through the audio channel.

Well, that’s exercised your working memory – let’s hope some new neural networks have been built. If you want a deeper understanding then here are some references to get you started.