The Role of Evolutionary Psychology in Our Understanding of Human Cognition: Consequences for Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Procedures

Cognitive load theory is an instructional design theory based on our knowledge of human cognitive architecture and evolutionary educational psychology. The theory assumes that curriculum areas covered in educational institutions are concerned with domain-specific, biologically secondary information that we have not specifically evolved to acquire rather than generic-cognitive, biologically primary skills that we have specifically evolved to acquire. There is a cognitive architecture associated with the acquisition, processing and use of domain-specific, biologically secondary information. That cognitive architecture can be specified by a series of principles. Those principles also apply to the information processing characteristics of evolution by natural selection and constitute a natural information processing system. The principles provide the core of cognitive load theory and have been used to generate instructional guidelines that facilitate knowledge acquisition. Using those guidelines, implications for practitioners are derived that indicate effective instructional procedures. Most of those procedures are concerned with reducing unnecessary cognitive load.