Cognitive overload [Horn1989] occurs in hypertext documents when the user has too many choices at one time. One of the goals of this project was to make the density of links between related ideas as high as possible. However, to offset the problem of cognitive overload, several simple strategies were employed.
First, nodes were limited to a discussion of a single idea. This allows the user access to a only few paragraphs at a time. By using the multiple windowing capabilities of Mosaic, the user can increase the information available at any one time; however, nodes were kept as simple as possible. Additionally, within a node, textual links to another node were not duplicated, but were linked only to the first occurrence of the appropriate text within the document. This avoids the user confusion that occurs when a link appears more than once in a document but both links point to the same node.