How players learn: a guide to cognitive load theory

When and why does cognitive overload occur?

Athletes may experience cognitive overload in training, for several reasons. Being aware of them helps you to best support your players in their learning and understanding.

Here are three of the reasons:

1. The skill is taking too long 

When a task is taking too long to complete or a skill is taking too long to learn, your athletes may not fully engage with it. 

They can start to feel overwhelmed and unsure of how to successfully complete it. This may result in cognitive overload slowing down the process.

2. The skill is too difficult 

When a skill appears difficult and complex, athletes may feel intimidated. This can activate your players’ fear of failure and result in them taking little action to complete the skill.

3. There are too many choices 

When there are too many ways an athlete can learn a skill, your players may feel unsure about the best way to go about it. Too many choices can leave an athlete feeling overwhelmed and result in cognitive overload. 

Strategies to combat this 

1. Break down longer tasks and skills

Setting smaller goals within a skill is a great way to ensure athletes have a clearer direction and don’t feel overwhelmed. 

2. Break down difficult skills into chunks

Tackling one very difficult skill may be less manageable than tackling a handful of easier tasks. 

3. Highlight a clear path

Make sure to give players a clear plan for completing a skill. This is probably even more important for beginners who cannot draw on past experiences to aid learning. 

Concepts and coaching

Different ideas have been developed in relation to Cognitive Load Theory to help improve learning and reduce overload.

There are three main concepts that are important for you as a coach to know - The redundancy effect, the split attention effect and emotional control.

The redundancy effect

When an athlete’s brain suffers cognitive overload, this has negative effects on their learning. 

Because their working memory is clogged up with unnecessary information, the athlete may only transfer the irrelevant or redundant information to the long-term memory and not the key learning points. This is the redundancy effect.

This causes your athletes’ working memory resources to be used inefficiently, hindering their learning. To reduce this, try to:

• Be clear and concise with any instructions or feedback

It is important your athletes remember the important parts and not the redundant bits.

• Reduce the words and animations on PowerPoint slides

This can cause distraction for your athletes and lead them to focus on the wrong things. 

• Know when to talk

If you are showing key information on a screen, don’t talk over it. Give athletes time to understand and absorb it first.

Ways for athletes to better control their emotions

1. Use music
2. Practise helpful self-talk 
3. Use positive imagery - e.g. imagine successfully scoring a goal
4. Reframe negative thoughts - instead of: "This is a really hard team, we are going to lose", try: "This team is difficult, so we are better able to test our skills."
5. Take deep breaths

The split attention effect

The split attention effect is best thought of as an act of juggling, where each item of information represents one ball. 

If you ask a novice juggler to use one too many balls, some will inevitably get dropped. In the same way, if you ask your athletes to refer to different sources of information simultaneously when learning something, this creates extra load in their brain. 

Switching between tasks takes time, effort and energy. So, what can you do to limit this from happening?

• Use one source of information

During any demonstrations, be clear about what you want athletes to pay attention to, whether it be your voice or the action in front of them.

• Use integrated diagrams

Integrating words within a diagram reduces load and boosts memory.

Emotional control 

There is also an additional factor of feeling stress and pressure when playing in matches. 

This stress can overload the brain and cause performance to weaken, which can lead to an athlete experiencing negative emotions and can decrease their confidence and motivation.

Because of this, cognitive load has been described as closely related to the emotional state of an athlete. 

This makes it highly important to help athletes learn to control their emotions when there is a lot of information to take in.