Stroop effect in dense reference material (was RE: Is there a term for this?

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gene Kim-Eng
> 
> Might be related to this:
> 
> http://snre.umich.edu/eplab/demos/st0/stroopdesc.html
> 
> Gene Kim-Eng

I wonder if that effect might be part of the reason why, 
for example, egregious errors appear and persist in software. 

On the one hand, programmers are dealing with thousands of 
lines of text, bursting with identical and similar strings, 
and endless variants on what they've been staring at all 
day, week, month. 

At the same time, since programming is one of the last 
bastions of rugged whatever-ism, programmers insist, 
and writers insist on agreeing with them, that their 
reference works and tutorials and examples be as terse 
and bland as possible.  

Looking up exactly the item that you know you need is 
trivial in a programmers reference manual. Looking up 
exactly the item you're not quite sure you need... is 
painfully not trivial, when so much of what surrounds 
the bit of info you seek looks so much like it, and 
like every other bit of info on neighboring pages and 
tables. 

"I'm sure the function I need is here - I'll know it 
when I see it." "If I actually see it, when my dry, 
tired eyes roll over it." "And back." "And over, and 
back."  "And ov...zzzzzz". 

 - k



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