Cognitive Load & Processing Interference

Abstractions about the capacity limits and interference patterns of attention and short-term memory — chunk-bounded spans like Miller's Law and working memory capacity, competing codes in the Simon and irrelevant speech effects, and costs paid at task switches and unfinished goals.

8 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Irrelevant speech effect — The finding that serial recall of verbal material is impaired by to-be-ignored background speech — even foreign or reversed — because changing-state speech-like sound gains obligatory, pre-attentive access to the phonological store and competes with the subvocally rehearsed task codes.
• Miller's Law (7 ± 2) — Miller's finding that immediate human recall is capped at a small integer of chunks (~7, later corrected nearer four) — separating a bounded item count from unbounded content per item, so the only way to hold more is to recode the unit, not widen the channel.
• Precedence Effect — When two copies of a sound arrive within a short critical window (~1–40 ms), the auditory system localizes the fused percept entirely by the first-arriving wavefront and discounts the lagging copy's spatial claim, while still letting it contribute to loudness and timbre.
• Simon Effect — Explain why responses are faster when a stimulus's task-irrelevant spatial location matches the response side: the perceptual system pre-attentively generates a same-side response code that facilitates selection when it agrees with the task-mandated code and costs ~30 ms when it conflicts.
• Task-Switching Cost — Isolate the performance penalty paid at the moment of changing between rule-sets — separate from either task's steady-state difficulty — by contrasting switch trials against repeat trials in the same mixed block, and split it into a preparation-reducible part and an irreducible residual.
• Word Frequency Effect — The robust finding that high-frequency words are recognised faster and more accurately than low-frequency ones, because lexical access is a graded, exposure-keyed threshold — retrieval speed falling roughly with the logarithm of a word's lifetime corpus frequency for that reader.
• Working Memory Capacity — The finite quantity of information a person can hold actively available for simultaneous manipulation — a small chunk-counted budget distinct from long-term and sensory memory — sized as supply against a task's demand, and attackable by chunking, offloading, or sequencing.
• Zeigarnik Effect — The finding that interrupted or unfinished tasks are recalled better than completed ones, because beginning a task installs a persisting goal-tension that keeps its representation activated until completion discharges it — scaled by goal-importance and gated on the interruption reading as a pause.