Cognitive Load, the Learning Environment, and Neurodivergent Learners

Jean-Paul Bayley posted an excellent piece on cognitive overload in the learning environment, which prompted me to write about neurodivergent overload, which is often overlooked by educators, who may not even be aware of it.

In this article, I’m talking about autistic burnout, but I’m referring to neurodivergent (ND) folx in general. NDs overlap significantly, particularly ADHD and autism, and distinguishing the two (even for seasoned and sympathetic professionals) is difficult; people often get one diagnosis and never get assessed for the other, and some research has argued they form a spectrum condition, so it’s more complicated than “that’s autism”, because humans are invariably more complex than a single, simple label. I’m also going to use the term “NT” to describe neurotypical types, who are not ND.

ND burnout can be defined as “the intense physical, mental or emotional exhaustion, often accompanied by a loss of skills, that some adults with [particularly] autism experience” (Spectrum News). Burnout of this type arises from a combination of two things: a) masking and b) sensory overstimulation, and is complicated by c) empathy and double empathy.

If you’ve ever thought (or said), ‘well, that person doesn’t look neurodiverse’, then you have seen the effect of masking.

Masking (aka camouflaging) is where ND people learn to behave in ways which aren’t natural for the ND person in order to ‘pass’ in wider society; this is often mandated in educational environments where particular behaviours (eg. stimming) are discouraged (“because it distracts other learners”) or other behaviours (eg. eye contact) are mandated (“how do we know you’re paying attention if you’re not looking at us”). Sometimes these are passive lessons (it’s normalised behaviour in the learning environment, reinforced by unconscious social disapproval of deviance) and other times they’re actively and intentionally reinforced (for example, ABA, applied behaviour analysis, is a form of therapy/abuse in which ND folx are punished — including use of electric shocks in some cases — for not meeting social norms).

Masking includes things like developing scripts for social interactions, including things like remembering to make eye contact, remembering to couch what one means in indirect language (neurotypical folx often take offence when you’re direct!) , and navigating multiway conversations (when can I speak? am I interrupting? how much information is too much information? why is this persons voice so beige?) to make contributions. This is in effect an extreme example of an intrinsic cognitive load: it’s been described (accurately imho) as running BehaveLikeANeurotypical.exe on top of everything else, with the problem that BehaveLikeANeurotypical.exe invariably takes up a lot of processor and memory resources.

Sensory overstimulation is related to extraneous cognitive load, but is in addition to the neurotypical experience of this concept. One of the defining features of some forms of neurodivergence — especially autism, but see note above — is that our brains don’t prune unnecessary connections between neurons. This means that we often find it difficult to filter out signals we received from our senses: we can often hear things that NT brains filter out, like air-con, electrical devices and even background noise.

We can be super sensitive to:

• temperature and temperature variations, this one affects most people of course, but can be more pronounced for ND people;
• physical vibrations (for example, if near a road or railway);
• visual stimuli, which might be in the presentation, a flaw in the screen, or outside a window: I cannot tell you the number of times I have been unable to focus on a slide deck because the font changes half way through, or content is not properly aligned;
• clothing: labels in the back of t-shirts, high collars, ties, material which feels “rough” to sensitive skin;
• smells such as overpowering aftershave or perfume or toilets which aren’t fragrant as they could be;
• furniture: the way one is sitting, or forced to sit in certain types of chair, or even forced to sit at all, can all add to things which increase cognitive load.

Empathy can also be an issue. Far from being anempathetic as some have suggested, ND people are often hyper-empathetic (our brains don’t prune connections in the same way as NT brains, remember), which means that other’s emotional states can be overwhelming. One of the ways in which some ND people manage this overwhelm is by actively ignoring the empathetic information they’re getting so they can regulate their own emotional state, but this can make it look like they’re not being sensitive to other people. (Often, masking helps hide this from other people, but this of course creates twice thecognitive load.)

In addition, the double empathy problem arises because ND and NT folx typically communicate in different ways: research has shown that ND-ND and NT-NT communication is typically highly efficient, but mixed communication requires both parties to think about how the other is thinking, making effective communication more complex, and adding to the cognitive load. So in a learning environment, think about how you communicate with learners, and about how learners communicate with each others!

So, I would add to JP’s post: be conscious of your ND learners. They may well have a baseline for overload which is lower than that of neurotypical folx, and we should account for that in the ways in which we teach. Becoming neurodiversity-aware in your learning environments might include a range of things which can help support ND folx, and which will invariably also make a more welcoming environment for your NT learners (and those who haven’t recognised their neurodivergence; the percentage of hidden ND people is non-trivial). You could try:

• ensuring that learners who are ND have an opportunity to talk to you about their needs before entering the classroom;
• providing or allowing (or at least not banning) fidget toys which are used as a sensory regulation activity ND folx (and NT folx find them good for stress as well);
• select environments which have decent temperature control and good acoustic isolation;
• consider the full range of communication needs, and ensure that activities have clear instructions with well-signposted outputs;
• provide a range of seating options (mats for the floor, sensory wobble cushions, standing spaces) to meet different needs;
• structure the learning to provide adequate breaks;
• allow learners to leave the room to regulate their level of burnout if needed;
• allow learners to participate to the extent they feel capable: not every learner will be capable of fully engaging with every activity;
• consider providing a range of assessment modes to meet different needs (writing prose is difficult for some people; some forms of presentation are difficult for others). Note that this doesn’t suggest that, for example, learning to teach doesn’t require presentation skills, but think about how that could be done in a way which allows students to build their confidence; and
• explicitly agree learning environment rules so that none of these are in doubt; and
• ensure that the process of learning how to create better learning environments is ongoing and bidirectional.

Coincidentally, Training from the Back of the Room is, from this autistic person’s perspective, good at giving consideration to all of these things, even if the needs of ND people aren’t explicitly talked about as a specific topic.

Being aware of cognitive load in the classroom is important; being aware that the cognitive loads of some people will be wildly different to others, and please do what you can to support those diverse needs.