Cognitive Load in Collaboration--Convergence

Collaboration is inherent to complex participatory multi-actor and multi-agent social technical systems. Supporting collaboration is challenging. One of the key production factors in collaboration is cognitive effort. Understanding cognitive load involved in collaborative tasks is therefore important to the design of collaboration support. This paper focuses on cognitive load related to convergence, a very complex collaborative task, that is much less studied than the often preceding, divergence or brainstorming task. On the basis of an overview of convergence techniques, and literature on convergence this paper presents a framework for the assessment of cognitive load during collaboration processes, and strategies to deal with cognitive load in convergence. The paper ends with a reflection on the use and implications of the framework.