WHAT IS COGNITIVE WORKLOAD?

COGNITIVE WORKLOAD is defined as the level of measurable mental effort put forth by an individual in response to one or more cognitive tasks. It is usually considered to be a property of an individual rather than a task.

Workload originally was a term used to characterize a job and referred to the amount of work that needed to be performed (‘the work’), usually within a fixed period of time (‘the load’). Over time, workload came to reflect job demands on the individual. With the introduction of the NASA-TLX Task Load Index), the term cognitive workload became “human-centered rather than task-centered”. Most researchers now consider cognitive workload to be a property of an individual rather than a task but both usages are still common.