Cognitive complexity


Cognitive complexity describes cognition along a simplicity-complexity axis. It is the subject of academic study in fields including personal construct psychology, organisational theory and human–computer interaction.

History

First proposed by James Bieri in 1955 with Cognitive complexity-simplicity and predictive behavior which was published that year in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. In the article, he tests two hypotheses:
In an attempt to explain how humans perceive relevance, cognitive complexity is defined as an extension of the notion of Kolmogorov complexity. It amounts to the length of the shortest description available to the observer. For example, individuating a particular Inuk woman among one hundred people is simpler in a village in Congo than it is in an Inuit village.
Cognitive complexity is related to probability : situations are cognitively improbable if they are simpler to describe than to generate.
Human individuals attach two complexity values to events:
  • description complexity
  • generation complexity: the size of the minimum set of parameter values that the 'world' needs to generate the event.
To 'generate' an event such as an encounter with an Inuk woman in Congo, one must add up the complexity of each event in the causal chain that brought her there. The significant gap between both complexities makes the encounter improbable and thus narratable.

In computer science

In human–computer interaction, cognitive complexity distinguishes human factors from, for example, computational complexity.

In psychology

Cognitive complexity is a psychological characteristic or psychological variable that indicates how complex or simple is the frame and perceptual skill of a person.
A person who is measured high on cognitive complexity tends to perceive nuances and subtle differences while a person with a lower measure, indicating a less complex cognitive structure for the task or activity, does not.
It is used as part of one of the several variations of the viable non-empirical evaluation model GOMS ; in particular the GOMS/CCT methodology.
Cognitive complexity can have various meanings:
  • the number of mental structures we use, how abstract they are, and how elaborately they interact to shape our perceptions.
  • "an individual-difference variable associated with a broad range of communication skills and related abilities... indexes the degree of differentiation, articulation, and integration within a cognitive system".

    Related terms

Related to cognitive complexity is the term behavioral complexity, used by some researchers in organizational studies, organizational culture and management.