Ok.
I don't think they proved anything.
I can't disagree with "the poor don't think right so we need to dumb things down for them" conclusion. (please read the end of the article where they make this case).
The notion that poverty causes poor thinking or poor thinking causes poverty wasn't proven one way or the other.
It's a study; an individual study does not and cannot prove anything, it tests a hypothesis.
You're welcome to disagree (and to support your disagreement with arguments), but I note that you are merely expressing personal beliefs and do not provide evidence to support those beliefs.
Also:
> I can't disagree with "the poor don't think right so we need to dumb things down for them" conclusion.
This is not actually the conclusion they make, and you are editorializing here; it's about reducing cognitive load. For example, shortening an exam that is too long (i.e. can't reasonably be completed in the allotted time) also reduces cognitive load, but not necessarily because the students taking that exam "don't think right" and it doesn't mean that the exam is "dumbed down".
The underlying problem is that for poor people, time becomes a substitute currency; you do things yourself that you cannot afford to buy or go into extra effort to reduce your expenses. But your cognitive resources to engage in such expense-optimizing behavior may also be finite, well before you run out of time, which in turn affects how much cognitive resources you have available for work, learning, etc.
No, it's not equivalent. Reducing cognitive load includes (in particular) the elimination of extraneous, non-germane, or duplicate information or tasks.
A specific example that the paper gives is filling out long forms; if you can replace a long form with a shorter one, that is a reduction in cognitive load and bureaucracy, but it is not "dumbing down" anything.
It's paywalled !!!
Keep downvoting me all you want.
I feel my point is valid.
The abstract you point to does include the methods.