[gravity13]

I think cognitive load is a perfectly acceptable term here. Taken within the context of Cognitive Load Theory, we assume that any individual can only maintain a few items into their working memory. These items are portions of the code that you need to think about at once in order to achieve a task, and good code partitions off the logic so that in order to understand individual components you only need to reserve a few slots of your working memory.

Of course this is a bit contrived, but I would argue that pretty much everything we've come to understand as "easy to read code" all reduces down to how effectively it organizes itself given the limitations of our working memory. And in that case, it's one of the first things you should be sure to understand on your path to becoming a better programmer.