Cognitive Load, Genre and Tropes

This is a sort of follow up to yesterday’s post and an expansion of a comment I made.

First of all, for those not familiar with the idea, “cognitive load” is a concept that comes from the study of problem-solving and is associated with an Australian academic called John Sweller. However, people are probably more familiar with some of its roots in the study of working memory. Working memory has known limits and we can use workarounds to side-step those limits. Memorising this set of 8 digits [12952045] is made easier by thinking of it as two sets of years 1295 and 2045.

More broad research found differences in memory related tasks between novices and experts. I can’t find a reference, so this is my anecdotal version but one example was memorising the position of pieces on a chess board. A non-chess expert will find it difficult to reconstruction an arrangement of pieces on a chess board but a chess-expert will find it much easier but…ONLY if it is a sensible arrangement. An expert chess player will still find it difficult if the pieces are all higgledy-piggledy in a way that couldn’t occur in a game.

Cognitive load theory extends that idea. First of all there’s the inherent difficulty of a problem. Some maths problems are just hard to work out if you don’t know the answer, even cutesy ones about boats with foxes, chickens etc. Secondly, there is a bunch of extraneous stuff, how the problem is presented, how it is worded, how diagrams are shown on the page, what irrelevant info is there. Thirdly is the effort we have to put into fitting the problem into the things that help us deal with all that stuff. For example, in the second paragraph I mention a trick for memorising a set of 8 digit numbers but if you under pressure to memorise a set of 8 digit numbers you still have to recall that trick and think about how to use it.

Familiar “schemas” for solving problems make solving problems easier by reducing mental effort. So, for example, being good at mental arithmetic isn’t the same as being good at maths problem solving (ask me how I know) but if your mental arithmetic is super effortless you have an advantage over me because I’ve got to stop what I’m doing and use a calculator.

Reading a story isn’t the same as doing a maths problem, even if it is a story about a train leaving a station and heading westwards with a cargo of boats, chickens and foxes. However, it is still a cognitive task…and also an emotional activity and a whole bunch of other things. The other things matter because factors like motivation matter as well. Even so, there is a substantial cognitive element and there is a degree of effort in reading (even if the “reading” is an audio book or being read to by a person…or even watching TV or a play or a movie).

Genres, to some degree and more specifically narrower sub-genres and tropes but also popular plot structures (“save the cat”, “heroes journey” etc) can be thought of a cognitive schemas.

Let me circle back to maths problems a moment. If a train leaves a station a S miles per hour, you as experienced adults who have sat through way too many school maths lessons already know that the shape, size, colour, and power source of the train are irrelevant. The more maths tests you sit the more you don’t even bother worrying about the irrelevancies. Sub-genres can offer similar clues to the reader about what is or isn’t of importance to the story. Familiar schemas from plot devices, character types or stock settings literally make stories easier to read, follow, remember and (I suspect) easier to write — in the sense of being less cognitively demanding.

I suspect if cognitive load theory had first been developed in the 2010s, it would have used the term “bandwidth” rather than load but neither entirely works as analogy. Also, “easier” does not mean the same as “easy”. The intrinsic difficulty of a piece of a novel or short story will include factors such as the number of key characters, the complexity of the plot, the depth of the characterisation, the depth of the themes and ideas in the story, as well as factors such as ambiguity or the poetical aspects of the writing.

Tropes and sub-genres can reduce the difficulty of a work but only if the reader (and writer) are sufficiently conversant in them. This is a particularly interesting point to me because arguably it should be easier to read and write a literary complex novel (what we might regard as high literature) if it is written within a deeply structured sub-genre. I guess there’s some degree to which mystery and romance can blend into more artsy literature but more “literature” is sometimes seen almost as an anti-genre.

Is that just a perception though? Wolf Hall is historical, The Satanic Verses is a fantasy, 1984 is science fiction. Sort of…part of the issue here is that “familiarity”. Of the stories I listed just then, really only Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall gained from a surrounding familiarity and only in so far as the story of Henry VIII and the politics of his marriages has been fictionalised so many, many times. Mantel’s brilliant imagining of the singular character of Thomas Cromwell works not because we are all experts on Tudor history but because several aspects of the story are dramatically familiar. Of the other two I suspect 1984 has become an easier book to read over time because it is a key text in establishing dystopian fiction.

Familiarity also raises two other aspects of fiction: comfort and surprise. For a story to surprise a reader, there has to be prior expectations. Familiarity helps create tension (because we anticipate something will occur but don’t know when) and also can defuse tension (because we know the thing will occur regardless). One of the most comforting ways of reading a novel is to re-read a novel and surprisingly the reader may find new elements and themes when they do so.

Is this a grand theory of genre? No. Science Fiction alone disproves that because “science fiction” alone is so unconstraining as a criterion that if that’s all you knew about a novel, you would almost know nothing. The big genre categories tell you very little in terms of underlying schemas (arguably Romance has a clear indication of what to expect). It is more that there are reasons beyond finding an audience why writers are drawn to genres and also why readers can react badly to stories that break the rules. In particular, I’m mindful of the claim that “X threw me out of the story” — those aspects of a story that a reader objects to. In some cases it is plain bigotry, in others features that get under the readers skin (an android character in a Becky Chambers novel that apparently is powered by what amounts to perpetual motion – or I may have just misunderstood and anyway why is that an issue but faster-than-light isnt…etc). Things that don’t fit expectations undermine the comfort of a story. That can be a good thing, particularly if the “comfort” is the reader’s unexamined prejudices about what ethnicity or sexuality or gender a protagonist can be.

Conversely, comfort (dare I say coziness) can arise simply out of familiarity. For a sub-genre of any kind that can arise out of a story doing what you expect it to. For a book you’ve read many times that could even be the technical details of the 19th century whaling industry.