Students’ Perception of Cognitive Load in an Accelerated DPT Program with a Blended Curriculum

Administrators and educators in higher education are interested in how academic tutoring services and gender impact perceptions of cognitive load and, therefore, students’ academic success. However, a lack of evidence existed in the literature regarding physical therapy students’ perception of cognitive load in an accelerated Doctor of Physical Therapy program with blended learning. Participants in this quantitative, non-experimental study completed the adapted Cognitive Load Scale to indicate their perception of cognitive load, participation in academic tutoring services, gender, and age. The DPT students perceived high cognitive overload, but a t value of 0.37 and a p value of 0.71 indicated that their perception was not significantly related to gender. Further, a t value of -3.09 and a p value of 0.005 indicated that academic tutoring services played a vital role in minimizing the perception of cognitive overload. However, the p value of 0.11 of the parametric multiple linear regression analysis and the p value of 0.59 of the interaction term indicated no moderating relationship between academic tutoring services and gender. This evidence may assist physical therapy administrators and educators of DPT students in re-structuring blended learning programs and accelerated curricula to reduce student perceptions of cognitive overload.

Investigating the cognitive capacity constraints of an ICU care team using a systems engineering approach

Background ICU operational conditions may contribute to cognitive overload and negatively impact on clinical decision making. We aimed to develop a quantitative model to investigate the association between the operational conditions and the quantity of medication orders as a measurable indicator of the multidisciplinary care team’s cognitive capacity. Methods The temporal data of patients at one medical ICU (MICU) of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN between February 2016 to March 2018 was used. This dataset includes a total of 4822 unique patients admitted to the MICU and a total of 6240 MICU admissions. Guided by the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety model, quantifiable measures attainable from electronic medical records were identified and a conceptual framework of distributed cognition in ICU was developed. Univariate piecewise Poisson regression models were built to investigate the relationship between system-level workload indicators, including patient census and patient characteristics (severity of illness, new admission, and mortality risk) and the quantity of medication orders, as the output of the care team’s decision making. Results Comparing the coefficients of different line segments obtained from the regression models using a generalized F-test, we identified that, when the ICU was more than 50% occupied (patient census > 18), the number of medication orders per patient per hour was significantly reduced (average = 0.74; standard deviation (SD) = 0.56 vs. average = 0.65; SD = 0.48; p < 0.001). The reduction was more pronounced (average = 0.81; SD = 0.59 vs. average = 0.63; SD = 0.47; p < 0.001), and the breakpoint shifted to a lower patient census (16 patients) when at a higher presence of severely-ill patients requiring invasive mechanical ventilation during their stay, which might be encountered in an ICU treating patients with COVID-19. Conclusions Our model suggests that ICU operational factors, such as admission rates and patient severity of illness may impact the critical care team’s cognitive function and result in changes in the production of medication orders. The results of this analysis heighten the importance of increasing situational awareness of the care team to detect and react to changing circumstances in the ICU that may contribute to cognitive overload.

Cognitive compatibility in modern manual mixed-model assembly systems

The compatibility concept is widely used in psychology and ergonomics. It describes the fit between elements of a sociotechnical system which is a prerequisite to successfully cooperate towards a common goal. For at least three decades, cognitive compatibility is of increasing importance. It describes the fit of externally presented information, information processing, and the required motor action. However, with increasing system complexity, probability for incompatibility increases, too, leading to time losses, errors and overall degraded performance. The elimination of cognitive incompatibilities through ergonomic measures at the workplace requires a lot of creativity and effort. Using practical examples from mixed-model assembly, improved information management and the use of informational assistance systems are discussed as promising ergonomic approaches. The ultimate goal is to avoid cognitive overload, for example in part picking or assembly tools choosing. To find a fit between externally mediated work instructions via displays and the subjectively used internal models and competencies is a challenging task. Only if this fit is given the system is perceived as beneficial. To achieve this, the assistance system should be configurable to fit individual needs as far as possible. Successful system design requires early participation and comprehensive integration of the assistance systems into the existing IT infrastructure.Practical relevance: Varied manual assembly requires a high degree of cognitive work. A rise in complexity of the assembly task increases the risk that cognitive incompatibility and thus cognitive overload will occur more frequently. It is shown that such unhealthy conditions can be countered by better information presentation and by the use of individually adaptable informational assistance systems.

Anthropomorphism and the success of human tool-use

Humans anthropomorphise: as a result of our evolved ultrasociality we see the world through person-coloured glasses. In this review, I suggest that an interesting proportion of the extraordinary tool-using abilities shown by humans results from our mistakenly anthropomorphising and forming social relationships with objects and devices. I introduce the term machination to describe this error, sketch an outline of the evidence for it, tie it to intrinsic rewards for social interaction, and use it to help explain overimitation—itself posited as underpinning human technological complexity—by human children and adults. I also suggest pathways for testing the concept’s presence and limits. With its explicit focus on individual variation and cognitive overload, machination holds promise for understanding how we create and use combinatorial technology, for clarifying differences with non-human animal tool use, and for examining the human fascination with objects.

Enhancing decision-making with data quality metadata

Purpose Data quality metadata (DQM) is a set of quality measurements associated with the data. Prior research in data quality has shown that DQM improves decision performance. The same research has also shown that DQM overloads the cognitive capacity of decision-makers. Visualization is a proven technique to reduce cognitive overload in decision-making. This paper aims to describe a prototype decision support system with a visual interface and examine its efficacy in reducing cognitive overload in the context of decision-making with DQM. Design/methodology/approach The authors describe the salient features of the prototype and following the design science paradigm, this paper evaluates its usefulness using an experimental setting. Findings The authors find that the interface not only reduced perceived mental demand but also improved decision performance despite added task complexity due to the presence of DQM. Research limitations/implications A drawback of this study is the sample size. With a sample size of 51, the power of the model to draw conclusions is weakened. Practical implications In today’s decision environments, decision-makers deal with extraordinary volumes of data the quality of which is unknown or not determinable with any certainty. The interface and its evaluation offer insights into the design of decision support systems that reduce the complexity of the data and facilitate the integration of DQM into the decision tasks. Originality/value To the best of my knowledge, this is the only research to build and evaluate a decision-support prototype for structured decision-making with DQM.

Choice

This chapter dives into why people sometime feel paralyzed by decisions. Challenging conventional wisdom that more choice is better, the chapter explains how choice can lead to cognitive overload, as demonstrated first by the story of a failed electronics retailer and then by a study involving a fruit jam display at a California farmers market. Yet choice is critical to a happy and prolonged life, as shown with some novel research involving houseplants in a nursing home setting. The chapter concludes on the compounding nature of decisions, where cause and effect is never as simple as it seems, as demonstrated by the Hindenburg disaster. Implications for the workplace include providing employee choice where it matters most, promoting worker autonomy, and recognizing human biases toward oversimplifying successes and failures.

Can You Make Better Decisions If You Are Bilingual?

Studies have shown that “framing bias,” a phenomenon in which two different presentations of the same decision-making problem provoke different answers, is reduced in a foreign language (the Foreign Language effect, FLe). Three explanations have emerged to account for the difference. First, the cognitive enhancement hypothesis states that lower proficiency in the FL leads to slower, more deliberate processing, reducing the framing bias. Second, contradicting the previous, the cognitive overload hypothesis, states that the cognitive load actually induces speakers to make less rational decisions in the FL. Finally, the reduced emotionality hypothesis suggests that speakers have less of an emotional connection to a foreign language (FL), causing an increase in rational language processing. Previous FLe research has involved both FL and non-FL speakers such as highly proficient acculturated bilinguals. Our study extends this research program to a population of heritage speakers of Spanish (HS speakers), whose second language (English) is dominant and who have comparable emotional resonances in both of their languages. We compare emotion-neutral and emotion-laden tasks: if reduced emotionality causes the FLe, it should only be present in emotion-laden tasks, but if it is caused by cognitive load, it should be present across tasks. Ninety-eight HS speakers, with varying degrees of proficiency in Spanish, exhibited cognitive biases across a battery of tasks: framing bias appeared in both cognitive-emotional and purely cognitive tasks, consistent with previous studies. Language of presentation (and proficiency) did not have a significant effect on responses in cognitive-emotional tasks, but did have an effect on the purely-cognitive Disjunction fallacy task: HS speakers did better in their second, more proficient language, a result inconsistent with the reduced emotionality hypothesis. Moreover, higher proficiency in Spanish significantly improved the rate of correct responses, indicating that our results are consistent with the cognitive overload hypothesis.