I'm relatively new to cognitive psychology. I read Anderson's Cognitive Psychology and its implications and found it extraordinary, but then again, I'm only a beginner.
I noticed that Anderson does not mention Sweller & Paas's Cognitive Load Theory, and the term cognitive load is not even in Anderson's index.
As I'm working in Natural Language Processing, I'm particularly interested in the Cognitive Psychology of Language, so I looked into Evans & Green's Cognitive Linguistics (858 pages!), the term "cognitive load" is totally absent from the book. Same thing for Warren's Introducing Psycholinguistics.
Can somebody with a more global overview of cognitive psychology and/or linguistics tell me why the Cognitive Load Theory is totally absent from these works? Is it considered as pseudo-science? Or as an exotic theory that the mainstream of the scientific community avoids? Or maybe it is known only to educators, and if this is the case, why so? Is it an abandoned theory or is it still active?
