How a first impression biases cognitive load assessments: Anchoring effects in problem-solving tasks of varying...

The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias in which people rely heavily on an initial piece of information when making judgments or decisions. Once an anchor - typically an objective numerical value - is set, subsequent assessments are adjusted around it, often insufficiently. The extent to which this effect influences cognitive load assessments is unclear. Particularly when students are required to assess cognitive load multiple times during problem-solving, they may resort to heuristics to simplify the cognitively demanding decision-making process. This experimental series aimed to investigate whether anchoring biases cognitive load assessments when students evaluated the cognitive load of several problem-solving tasks. Across three experiments (N₁ = 100, N₂ = 87, N₃ = 80) students assessed the cognitive load of tasks with varying levels of element interactivity (low, moderate, high) multiple times during problem solving. Task sequences were varied to examine whether the first impression of complexity influenced subsequent assessments. The results were mixed: In Experiments 1 and 2, the first impression did not influence the following assessment, but Experiment 3 confirmed the hypothesized anchoring effect. However, this finding cannot be solely attributed to anchoring, as several factors - such as subjective perceptions of complexity, scale effects, task-specific differences, and memory and consistency effects - may have contributed. The findings suggest that anchoring is more likely to occur when there is a substantial contrast between the anchor and subsequent assessments. Furthermore, objective anchors, such as pre-defined numerical values, may exert a stronger influence on decision-making processes than subjective ones, like self-generated assessments.