United Minds or Isolated Agents? Exploring Coordination of LLMs under Cognitive Load Theory
For practitioners building LLM systems, this provides a principled design lens (CLT) to manage context limitations, though the gains are incremental and task-dependent.
The paper identifies a bottleneck in LLMs on complex tasks due to limited attention budget (context rot), drawing an analogy to Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). It introduces CoThinker, a multi-agent framework that distributes cognitive load via specialization and structured communication, showing gains on reasoning-heavy tasks but overhead on low-load tasks.
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a notable performance ceiling on complex, multi-faceted tasks. As practitioners increasingly rely on heavy context engineering -- curating intricate instructions, tool schemas, and multi-turn histories -- the processing demands often exceed the LLM's effective attention budget, leading to context rot. Drawing an analogy to Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) in cognitive science, we propose that this bottleneck is functionally analogous to the bounded working memory of the human mind. Rather than relying on heuristic prompt engineering, we use CLT as a principled design lens for LLM system design. To operationalize this insight, we introduce CoThinker, an instantiation of a CLT-driven multi-agent framework. CoThinker operationalizes CLT principles by distributing intrinsic cognitive load through agent specialization and managing transactional load via structured communication and a collective working memory. We empirically evaluate CoThinker on complex problem-solving tasks and fabricated high cognitive load scenarios. Our results are consistent with a CLT-informed account of multi-agent coordination: gains concentrate on reasoning-heavy tasks where cognitive load is high, while coordination overhead dominates on low-intrinsic-load tasks such as instruction-following -- a boundary predicted by the cognitive-load-profile view. Our analysis reveals characteristic interaction patterns that cast insights from collective cognition and load management into a principled approach to agent system design.