Technologies and cognitive distribution co-evolutionary dynamics. Credit: Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2025.08.003

A new paper explores how managing cognitive load distribution is vital for navigating complex technologies and enabling their effective use.

In October 1935, the U.S. Army held a flying competition. On paper, Boeing’s entry, nicknamed the Flying Fortress, appeared to be the clear favorite. It was bigger, faster, and could fly farther than other bombers. Captained by an experienced test pilot, the Flying Fortress took off, rose 300 meters, stalled, and then came crashing down to Earth, killing the pilot and another crew member.

The problem was not mechanical. Nor was it poor training. Instead, as one newspaper put it, the bomber was “too much airplane for one man to fly.” With four engines and an array of complicated controls, the Flying Fortress required many intricate operations to be performed at once—more than even the most competent pilot could remember.

The Flying Fortress is a prime example of how a technology can fail when it requires more brainpower than a single person can muster. “Tech can get too cumbersome to be used,” explains Helena Miton, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Miton examines how technological advancements have forced us to find ways to manage and distribute the cognitive load required to use these innovations. Co-authored with Joshua Jackson, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Management, the paper highlights the importance of these workarounds for the development of future technologies.

“This is a huge constraint on whether tech systems can evolve or not,” Miton says. It doesn’t matter how great the tech is. If it’s too complicated to operate, it won’t work.

We don’t always need high-tech solutions to help us carry the cognitive load. After the Flying Fortress crash, the Army realized that future mishaps could be prevented with a simple fix: a checklist. Armed with an index card listing the steps for takeoff, flight, and landing, pilots were able to fly the Flying Fortress (also known as the B-17) 1.8 million miles without an accident. Now, checklists are a routine part of aviation as well as safety-conscious fields such as surgery and construction.

Tools that help us think

People continually find new ways to ease the cognitive load of tasks—a phenomenon known as cognitive load distribution. “The idea is that there are cognitive processes that are not just within individual minds,” says Miton, who specializes in how technology and culture coevolve. When we count on our fingers, add appointments to our calendars, or make to-do lists, we are taking these processes out of our heads and putting them into our environment, where we can keep track of them more easily.

These “tools that help people think” aren’t new. An early example cited by Miton and Jackson is the Jacquard loom, an early 19th-century invention that used punch cards to help weavers create and repeat intricate patterns without memorization. “The looms reduced the mental load on the operators, and distributed cognitive labor across designers, cutters, operators, and the loom itself,” the researchers write.

By distributing the cognitive load among lots of people, we can avoid overburdening a single person. Yet that makes coordination between people even more crucial. Companies may use project management software such as Trello or Jira to track employees’ responsibilities. In air traffic control centers, shifts overlap so that controllers can communicate what’s going on before they leave. Electronic medical charts have reduced errors by replacing handwritten doctors’ notes with easily readable and shareable records.

Although all of this coordination can become a chore, Miton says it’s a “necessary evil.” She points to failures of coordination behind famous disasters such as the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

Miton and Jackson also note that in response to the growing complexity of coordinating all these different specialists and discrete systems, managers have become an increasingly important part of organizations. They point to a 2002 experiment in which Google attempted to eliminate middle managers entirely. Coders began to bother CEO Larry Page, asking about their responsibilities and complaining about interpersonal problems. The company brought the managers back in short order.

(Less) information is power

Cognitive distribution may involve limiting the amount of information one person receives. This may be done with standardized language or simplified information displays. (Think signs that show extreme fire risk warnings in red or credit score ratings that show good credit in green.) Creating “information bottlenecks” can also help people focus on critical work. No-conversation rules eliminate extraneous chatter and distractions during critical tasks such as landing an airplane or performing heart surgery.

Another strategy for cognitive distribution requires limiting or filtering how much information users have access to. For example, cars’ simplified controls enable almost anyone to operate a vehicle, and user-friendly interfaces like Claude and ChatGPT make large language models accessible to people who do not understand the coding and algorithms working behind the scenes. Yet these interfaces also widen the gap between being able to use a technology and understanding how it works. “It’s a trade-off,” Miton says, but a worthwhile one.

Miton and Jackson argue that without these cognitive distribution techniques, many technologies would never have evolved. “Innovations for distributing cognition not only emerge following rises in technological complexity: They can also contribute to these rises,” they write. Checklists, “sterile cockpit” rules, and simplified interfaces made flying much safer. In turn, that safety encouraged further investment in more advanced airplanes and technologies such as air traffic control.

Looking ahead, Miton would like to develop a system to describe and quantify cognitive distribution as it happens. “It’s easy to describe at length in an ethnographic way but harder to create metrics that you can compare across situations,” she says. She hopes that by demonstrating the importance of cognitive distribution to technological development, she can spur new studies into how these two phenomena interact and affect one another.

More information: Helena Miton et al, Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition, Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2025.08.003

Citation: How to advance technology without cognitive overload (2025, October 21) retrieved 21 October 2025 from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-advance-technology-cognitive-overload.html

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