ArticleMemory & cognition2026
How a first impression biases cognitive load assessments: Anchoring effects in problem-solving tasks of varying element interactivity.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Educational strategies for enhancing medical students' competency in laboratory medicine practice: a scoping review.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
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 (N
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