Duolingo's Attention Budget

Working memory is small, fixed, and the thing every screen is actually competing for. Duolingo treats it as a budget with a ledger — effort that is inherent to the task, effort wasted on presentation, and effort spent on real processing — and designs each unit against that ledger rather than against a content plan.

This skill is about one screen or one sitting. The shape of the whole path — what order things come in, when supports get removed — belongs to the progression-design skill; see [[../duo-progression-design/references/scaffold-and-fade-on-a-schedule|scaffold and fade on a schedule]]. If "my onboarding is bad" is really "the first session asks too much at once," you are in the right place.

Start here

• [[references/three-kinds-of-effort-cap-cut-and-add]] — sort effort into inherent, wasted, and productive; cap the first, cut the second, add the third on purpose.
• [[references/salience-is-a-budget-and-it-front-loads]] — attention amplifies one signal and suppresses the rest, and it spends itself early in any sequence.

Sizing a unit

• [[references/cap-novelty-then-force-immediate-use]] — a hard, tool-enforced ceiling on new material per unit, and zero gap between introducing it and using it.
• [[references/hold-everything-but-the-target-constant]] — a unit that teaches one thing must freeze every other variable, or the signal has competition you created.
• [[references/isolate-the-new-element-at-the-front]] — meet the new element alone, at the start, so the later mixed task tests integration rather than recognition.

Spending the budget on the right thing