Effects of Cognitive Load on Complex Decision-Making | fNIRS Study

Introduction. Yang et al. (2025) acknowledge that in engineering design, decision-making tasks often require collaboration among multidisciplinary teams. Differences in the knowledge structures of various disciplines can lead to ambiguities or misunderstandings of specialized terminology and concepts – meaning discrepancy – leading to communication barriers that may ultimately affect the quality of final decisions. The research team suggests that such communication failures occur due to cognitive conflict induced by increased cognitive load. Previous studies of decision-making paradigms have explored managerial influence theories and behavioral analyses, however, the cognitive and neural mechanisms of interdisciplinary group decision-making were largely unexplored. To fill in this gap, Yang et al. (2025) developed an experimental Multi-Attribute Decision-Making with Layered Group Dynamics (MADM-LGD) task – a decision path model that connects diversity of meaning interpretations with cognitive conflict, increased cognitive load, and reduced communication efficiency. This study uses fNIRS to track prefrontal oxygenation, integrating semantic and linguistic analyses to explore how cognitive level and interdisciplinary communication shape the quality of group decision-making.