[HN Gopher] 'Visual clutter' alters information flow in the brain
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'Visual clutter' alters information flow in the brain
Author : gnabgib
Score : 119 points
Date : 2024-10-22 19:17 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.yale.edu)
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Sending this to my partner next time I ask them to clean up.
| lupire wrote:
| This is a minor technical detail of a well known obvious fact.
| Research, but news.
| botanical76 wrote:
| I wonder if this is relevant to tech workers. Does a second
| monitor - if not used as a productivity boost, but rather a
| neutral convenience - hinder your capability to focus on tasks?
| Should we turn it off to properly focus?
|
| I have suspected this might be the case for a while, but I'm
| not aware that it is obvious.
| lioeters wrote:
| I don't know about other people, but I seem to be able to
| focus more _with_ visual and auditory noise. Something to do
| with "stochastic resonance"?
|
| A quick search yields:
|
| > Beneficial effects of noise on higher cognition have
| recently attracted attention. Hypothesizing an involvement of
| the mesolimbic dopamine system and its functional
| interactions with cortical areas, the current study aimed to
| demonstrate a facilitation of dopamine-dependent attentional
| and mnemonic functions by externally applying white noise in
| five behavioral experiments.
|
| > ..These results suggest that white noise has _no general
| effect on cognitive functions_.
|
| Differential effects of white noise in cognitive and
| perceptual tasks
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4630540/
|
| > Perceptual decision-making relies on the gradual
| accumulation of noisy sensory evidence. It is often assumed
| that such decisions are degraded by adding noise to a
| stimulus, or to the neural systems involved in the decision
| making process itself. But it has been suggested that adding
| an optimal amount of noise can, under appropriate conditions,
| enhance the quality of subthreshold signals in nonlinear
| systems, a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance.
|
| Stochastic resonance enhances the rate of evidence
| accumulation during combined brain stimulation and perceptual
| decision-making
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6066257/
| ehnto wrote:
| I went from two screens back to one with a tiling window
| manager.
|
| What I was finding, was each tab/window/screen swap was a
| chance to lose focus. In practice I do lose focus a lot if
| I'm switching between screens.
|
| I don't have the same issue with tiles, and I can also setup
| workspaces to act a bit like focus rooms. I do a lot of
| little things to retain focus, another one is removing the
| mouse from my workflow as much as possible as it feels kind
| of like taking your hands off the wheel to fiddle with the
| car stereo. You switch mode, and that can disrupt focus.
| mega_dean wrote:
| I've noticed that I get very distracted by motion in my
| peripheral vision, but not by static images. So I can use a
| second monitor for things like documentation, but not
| something like Slack that shows new messages, animated
| gifs/emojis, etc.
|
| I've also configured my text editor to be very "static": when
| I type, the only things that can happen are the cursor moves,
| or text is inserted. I have to manually trigger things like
| the autocompletion popup, LSP checks, or highlighting the
| symbol under the cursor.
| botanical76 wrote:
| This reminds me of some of the early linting tools that
| emerged around the time ES5 / node.js was blowing up. I
| found the defaults to be insanely distracting, giving me
| warnings about unused variables etc as I was still typing
| the code (of course it's unused, I just defined it!)
|
| GitHub Copilot is similar, defaulting to provide
| suggestions to finish your LOC whenever you stop typing.
| While the AI tools can be very useful, the benefit is lost
| if I can't focus on what I'm writing.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| That's one of the reasons I use Vim. It does absolutely
| nothing without an input and has nothing unnecessary on the
| screen. Unfortunately pretty much all modern editors and
| IDEs aim for the exact opposite, the last time I tried VS
| Code it even had a button floating above the code for some
| git related stuff.
|
| So far I haven't seen a piece of software that tries to do
| everything under the sun while also being enjoyable to use.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| I figure the OP link and adversarial images (in ML) are special
| cases of a more general class of tomography problems.
| 65 wrote:
| It's also interesting how your brain processes information in the
| corner of your eye. It seems to only process the most basic
| information - not even color.
|
| If I take a red Coke can and place it in the corner of my eye, I
| can't even tell what color it is. I can tell there's an object
| there but the color does not come through until I place it
| slightly more in my direct line on sight.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I was about to post a link about the fact that our retinas
| themselves can't sense colors in our peripheral vision.
|
| But apparently that's been debunked!
|
| https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/science-and-vision/research/2015/1...
| jangxx wrote:
| Back in high school a teacher told us this "fact" as well and
| I remember being very surprised because it did not match my
| experience at all. Many times have I tested this theory
| since, e.g. when waiting at a pedestrian traffic light,
| looking off to the side so that the light is on the very edge
| of my peripheral vision, seeing if I can perceive it turn
| green and always being able to. Of course this is not proof
| that there are no people who can't do this, but I definitely
| know that I can see color at the edge of my peripheral vision
| and I've come to assume that this just varies from person to
| person.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| That opposite of what Einstein said
| hbarka wrote:
| Isn't this really just signal-to-noise ratio? The information
| flow can be any input, be it visual, auditory, tactile, etc.
| "Clutter" is not a neutral word and leads the reader.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Visual clutter" is an existing term that's been in use for a
| while now:
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22visual+clut...
| cushpush wrote:
| Aren't you suggesting that we use the ear term for the eye term
| instead of the eye term for the ear term? ;)
| Nevermark wrote:
| Signal-to-noise is often used as a modality independent term.
|
| Someone might reference signal-to-noise issues with modern
| news sources, body language, or a data set of any particular
| origin.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That seems intuitive. E.g. It is pretty common for people to
| turn down the radio in their car when they are looking
| carefully for an address.
| gwern wrote:
| Fulltext: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/vision/2024-xu.pdf
| Rugu16 wrote:
| Good article!
|
| "Therefore, the detailed visual information you're getting is
| from the car in front of you, but the information of interest is
| outside of your focus."
|
| This must be one of the reasons you get fatigue and exhaustion
| during traffic rush hour due to so much visual information.
| cushpush wrote:
| I noticed intense fatigue wandering Tokyo with my friend who
| wore magnifying lenses and he could not understand why I was
| tired. I said it's all the visual stimulation, the signs, the
| lights, the billboards. I think he was at an advantage with the
| eyewear, in retrospect.
| nox101 wrote:
| isn't this the counter example? japanese ads, magazines,
| documents, websites, are often super visually cluttered.
| seems counter to the paper to me
|
| if this clutter has negatie affects why has japanese design
| settled on it?
| Rugu16 wrote:
| Its same for TimeSquare still people pay big dollars. Both
| things can be right, it has negative effect however it is
| still engaging and effective. It gets the eyeballs
| famahar wrote:
| This may just be one small point, but I recall reading that
| visual clutter signifies a good bargain while lots of white
| space gives the impression of luxary. Most consumers want a
| good deal.
| cal85 wrote:
| Why does the effect seem to be reversed when out in nature?
| When I walk in the woods, the visual complexity is arguably
| much higher than it ever gets in cities, even on a busy
| highway. But the mental effect seems to be rejuvenating.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think the fractal patterns match our million year old
| brains expectations, "stuff" in the article refers to "stuff
| i need to focus on" (which is everywhere in traffic but
| mostly in front of you while hiking, and in general, focusing
| 100 yards away is better for the eyes, and a good walk helps
| everyone feel better. But this is mostly off topic opinion.
| ycombinete wrote:
| That depends on the nature of the nature. Walking through the
| African veld is also tiring, because you're constantly
| processing threat signals.
| oscillonoscope wrote:
| It's partly because you're not paying attention. Next time
| you're out in the woods, try to still hunt for a while. It's
| a hunting method where you move extremely slowly throughout
| the woods from cover to cover while watching for animals.
| You'll find that it takes a lot of mental focus to maintain
| that level of vigilance.
| Rugu16 wrote:
| I feel the opposite, in nature I find the complexity much
| less. Things are not really moving, they are static. Colors
| are also very much within similar range. You can be very much
| in passive mode and enjoy the scenery vs actively trying to
| process.
| spike021 wrote:
| One of the ways to load balance the visual information is to
| scan around the car and briefly look at other things.
|
| Checking mirrors often, looking outside your side window, etc.
|
| Whenever I do those things it helps refresh me quite a bit.
| cushpush wrote:
| Tangential: staring at a computer screen while having a phone
| call is distracting. Recommend looking at not-a-screen while
| talking on-the-phone :)
| cj wrote:
| I have a (IMO bad) habit of looking away from my computer
| screen (at visual nothingness) when having concentrated
| discussions over video calls.
|
| For whatever reason it's just easier to talk when staring out
| the window at a tree than staring at a face on a screen. I call
| it a bad habit because it results in accidentally ignoring body
| language of the person on the other end
|
| 100% with phone calls. I typically just slowly pace around
| around my house when on a phone call without video.
| 6510 wrote:
| Strange, for me it is obvious how it works.
|
| It goes for locations and activities too but mostly if I look
| at something it locks and unlocks memories but the thing I'm
| looking at also becomes part of the active memory.
|
| You have a bunch of stuff hashed against the tree or against
| a dead gaze or you don't want the person to be part of the
| thought process.
|
| I forgot the code for the warehouse at a previous job. Typing
| the wrong one locks the place down. I somewhat panicked but
| went there anyway, got distracted by something and typed the
| code without even thinking about it. I also remembered it
| after walking inside. Took some coffee and it was gone again.
| I thought, I've been typing that code for years but had never
| realized I only remember it when looking at the door.
| cj wrote:
| As I reflect and re-read my comment, I think for me it's
| simply I'm overloaded.
|
| Looking at a face while talking vs. a tree just increases
| the mental energy necessary for the call. When you're
| chronically exhausted, you start cutting out the little
| things that seemingly don't matter (like someone's body
| language or facial expression during a call)
|
| Definitely a tangent here. Love the warehouse example
| though. Similarly, I can't for the life of me recite my
| iphone, Apple Watch, or home security alarm PIN codes. It's
| just pure muscle memory at this point. When I try to recall
| the PIN codes in my head, my mind immediately tries to
| recall the numbers by visualizing my phone (or alarm
| keypad) and attempting to remember the movement of my
| fingers in order to deduce what the numbers are.
| sorokod wrote:
| Some figma boards end up looking like someone vomited a pile of
| confetti. A prime example of visual clutter for me.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I've learned its best to have everyone's camera off in a VOIP
| call. For many reasons, one cuz if I see faces on screen live it
| distracts my brain internals enough it impairs my effective IQ in
| the moment, and adds a kind of biological lag. I don't need any
| fancy academic studies to "prove" it, because I've lived through
| directly hundreds of A-vs-B cases over many years.
|
| You lose some things without live faces/cameras, but also gain a
| lot.
|
| Blog post of mine on it:
|
| https://synystron.substack.com/p/video-calls-good-and-bad
| pxc wrote:
| > we can't read out of the corner of our eyes, no matter how hard
| we try
|
| This is not quite true. Reading via peripheral vision is a skill,
| but most people never have the right kind of motivation (and
| perhaps not the right kind of visual stimulus) to learn it. I
| know this because I have personally known someone who read
| exclusively via her peripheral vision.
|
| There's an inherited retinal disease that runs in my family. It's
| a form of 'cone-rod dystrophy'. Cone-rod dystrophies are diseases
| where the cones and the rods in the eye eventually stop
| responding to light. The order of the terms in the naming
| reflects the typical order of the dystrophy: first the cones
| (responsible for central vision) go, then the rods (responsible
| for peripheral vision) go, too. As the cones and rods go bad,
| this results in loss of visual acuity in central and peripheral
| vision respectively. (It often causes lots of other, less generic
| problems, too, such as: blind spots, warping/twisting distortions
| in the visual field, sometimes flickering artifacts, progressive
| colorblindness, extreme light sensitivity, and an effective
| reduction of contrast.)
|
| Between individual cases, there's a lot of variation in how the
| disease presents. There's no fixed timeline or ordering for the
| progression (even though the disease's genetic cause has been
| identified as just a single gene!).
|
| Anyhow, in my late aunt's case, her central vision was useless
| long before her peripheral vision could give out. So she learned,
| somehow, to do things like read her smartphone using only her
| peripheral vision.
|
| We chatted about it once or twice. Onlookers often could not
| comprehend that she was looking at her phone, since her eyes
| weren't pointed towards it. She once laughed to me about how
| someone had asked her 'Why are you sniffing your phone?', while
| she held it up to her face to read a text message.
|
| My impression is that learning to rely on your peripheral vision
| in this way is extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to do.
| (This may have something to do with the mechanisms discussed in
| TFA.) I wonder if it can even be done at all without first
| obscuring one's central vision (which I guess you could do
| artificially with contacts). But evidently it _can_ be done.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It makes me think of a common trick in stargazing that is to
| look at stars with peripheral vision. Fixating them will make
| them disappear.
|
| That's because the fovea, the "high resolution" part of the eye
| we use when focusing on some point is entirely made of cone
| cells, which give you color vision, but are less sensitive, as
| opposed to rod cells, that make up most of the peripheral
| vision. In other words, peripheral vision is better in low
| light situations.
| axwdev wrote:
| I discovered this growing up when lying in bed at night. I'd
| always feel like there was light coming under the door. Then
| I'd look directly at it and it was pitch black to me. I'd
| look to the side and the light would seemingly come back.
| Only years later did I discover the cause you described.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I guess what the article means is that it's not possible to
| read with peripheral vision except with very large font size
| and up close. Was your aunt able to read normal print besides
| titles? Also, I just tried out of curiosity. I must imagine
| only her fovea was unusable, and the area just around it (I
| think it's like 5deg off-axis) was still fine, because I think
| I have pretty good peripheral vision, and I can't make out
| anything if I intentionally look away from what I'm trying to
| read. Certainly not on a phone; I have to get it so close to my
| face that it goes out of focus.
|
| By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely
| packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not
| central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and
| vision in low-light environments.
| pxc wrote:
| > except with very large font size and up close
|
| Yeah, it's hard to say what the determinative factors were
| because her general visual acuity was so low that she
| generally needed very large fonts very up close anyway. My
| mom and my sister and I also have this condition and rely on
| magnification to varying degrees (and for various reasons--
| sometimes it's truly about acuity but sometimes larger
| sizes/bolder fonts are a clumsy way to try to make up for
| contrast issues). But even those of us with usable central
| vision generally need large fonts anyway. We're also all, for
| reasons I think are mostly incidental, naturally myopic
| (although my mom is no longer nearsighted but farsighted
| (with low acuity-- she's legally blind)).
|
| > Was your aunt able to read normal print besides titles?
|
| No. Even titles, like titles of chapters in a paperback, she
| could likely only read with magnification. And that's if she
| could get enough contrast at all. At some point, screens
| become much easier to read than paper, even at equal sizes.
|
| I should learn more about the precise anatomy because it's
| interesting, but currently I know more about the subjectivity
| of it than the mechanics.
|
| > By the way, while it is true that cones are far more
| densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision,
| not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion
| perception and vision in low-light environments.
|
| There may be other factors in these inherited retinal
| dystrophies that affect the way their progressions affect
| field of view, idk. But what I said about which areas are
| first distorted for cone-rod dystrophies is true, and its
| reverse is true for rod-cone dystrophies (i.e., retinitis
| pigmentosa), where people with that condition lose their
| peripheral vision first and their field of view shrinks from
| the outside-in. My assumption so far has been that this
| corresponds to those density differences you mentioned.
|
| > Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in
| low-light environments.
|
| I do know _that_ much. :)
|
| One of the features of this illness that's very prevalent for
| me and my sister right now is extreme light sensitivity,
| presumably because our eyes rely increasingly on their rods
| even during the daytime and even in high-light environments.
| One related I've written about on HN before is how the need
| for lower total light emission pushes both of us to high-
| contrast dark themes with the lowest brightness possible.
| OLED screens are really nice when your rods are in better
| shape than your cones!
|
| One that I don't think I have is that my colorblindness has
| been getting worse over time. The last time I took a
| colorblindness test (administered by a medical professional,
| at my retinal specialist's office), I could hardly read any
| of the Ishihara plates at all. (When the doctor came in, he
| asked me if I only saw in black-and-white, which I found
| mildly irksome but very amusing. I laughed about it with my
| family afterwards. I do still see many colors! I just have
| trouble distinguishing a lot of them, too.) My sister, who
| was not colorblind at all when she was growing up, is now
| also colorblind, about as much as me based on her tests.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Interesting! I dragged this icon onto my desktop to read later.
|
| Oh no!
| GuB-42 wrote:
| What counts as a "visual stimulus" is unclear to me. Does it mean
| a static object, as opposed to a blank surface or something that
| moves, and if it is something that moves, does it move
| predictably (ex: a rotating fan) or not (ex: a notification).
|
| It is kind of obvious that stimuli like notifications are
| disruptive, but less so in the other cases.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I always looked at my feet while walking as a kid. People
| sometimes thought I was depressed, but I was just always
| thinking, and reducing visual noise in service of that.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Been yelled at one too many times for being bad at finding things
| when trying to find something amidst clutter.
|
| I try my best, and it's like...I just can't see it without a lot
| of effort and more time than you'd think.
| krunck wrote:
| Take Amazon's web site for instance....
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