Increased cognitive load enables unlearning in procedural category learning.

Abstract

Interventions for drug abuse and other maladaptive habitual behaviors may yield temporary success, but are often fragile and relapse is common. This implies that current interventions do not erase or substantially modify the representations that support the underlying addictive behavior — that is, they do not cause true unlearning. One example of an intervention that fails to induce true unlearning comes from Crossley, Ashby, and Maddox (2013, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General), who reported that a sudden shift to random feedback did not cause unlearning of category knowledge obtained through procedural systems, and they also reported results suggesting that this failure is because random feedback is non-contingent on behavior. These results imply the existence of a mechanism that (1) estimates feedback contingency, and (2) protects procedural learning from modification when feedback contingency is low (i.e., during random feedback). This article reports the results of an experiment in which increasing cognitive load via an explicit dual-task during the random feedback period facilitated unlearning. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism that protects procedural learning when feedback contingency is low depends on executive function.

An exploratory investigation of the measurement of cognitive load on shift: Application of cognitive load theory in emergency medicine

“…Attending and resident physician groups reported an average overall CL of 5 using the nine-point Paas Scale, which falls within the range for optimal learning and performance (score of 3-6 out of 9) as reported by Fraser et al 26 Therefore, according to psychometric measures of CL reported in this acute care setting, current patient case load did not appear to overwhelm limits of WM to cause significant cognitive overload. This is a significant finding as cognitive overload has been associated with unlearning, 27 mental burnout, and patient errors. 28 It is important to consider that though both the attending and the resident groups had similar measures of CL, attending physicians carried a significantly higher patient load at any given time, suggesting that attending EM physicians were able to do more with the same investment of mental effort as residents.…”

Immersive technology-driven investigations on influence factors of cognitive load incurred in construction site hazard recognition, analysis and decision making

“…Ryu and Torres (2018) found that the change of cognitive load could significantly alter task performance in terms of accuracy and time management. Crossley et al (2018) and Bi et al (2019) further verified the effects of cognitive load on individuals' task performance. However, these prior studies were largely limited to 2-dimensional image-based static site scenarios, which could not fully capture the more complicated, interactive, and dynamic real site environment that individuals face.…”

Forgetting to learn and learning to forget: the call for organizational unlearning

“…Unlearning has been researched within the domain of psychology with regard to addiction (Crossley et al , 2018) and social bias (Aczel et al , 2015) as well as within the realm of organizational unlearning (Nguyen, 2017). However, psychologists have also argued that unlearning cannot occur (Howells and Scholderer, 2016).…”