A Remedy against Cognitive Load: Creating Playful Complexity in Activity and Inquiry-Based Learning
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Topoi
Publication Date
11-25-2025
Abstract/ Summary
Critical thinking and inquiry are considered cornerstones of 21st-century skills that must be taught via our education systems. Two growing approaches to teaching these skills are activity-based learning and inquiry-based learning. Simultaneously, with the advent of embodied cognition across the mind sciences, embodied learning is also beginning to take hold as a substantial theory and practice. However, some recent critiques claim that activity-based learning can easily suffer from increased cognitive load so that students only learn the rules of the activity and not the underlying educational points. I here recast the cognitive load problem in embodied, ecological, and dynamic terms to demonstrate that complexity in educational activities is not necessarily an impediment to learning as long as the activities create emergent complexity of the right kind. Activity rules and instructions can facilitate critical thinking and inquiry when they create; an open-ended problem space, student agency, emergent student interactions, and playful absorption. In short, complexity is not the problem per se; rather, from rules and instructions, an immersive behavior setting must emerge in which students can playfully experiment with affordances. The cognitive load problem on this reading is that some (often linear) learning activities only generate a narrow field of affordances. In recasting the cognitive load problem in embodied, dynamic, and ecological terms, I also demonstrate how affordances and sensorimotor group interaction can “scale-up” and constitute higher-order learning including abstract and critical thinking without any commitments to mental representations or cognitivist notions of information processing.