Re: Is there a term for this?

["Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>]

My wife the quality engineer, who just tried the red-white-green-brown  
Stroop test and got the shivers from it, says that the right way to handle  
a list such as Joe mentions is to divide it into several separate lists,  
each no more than five items long. The separation can be categorization,  
or as simple as breaking the list into sets of five with spacing.

This technique indeed matches the "crow" experiment, and also the  
separately studied ability of people to remember up to five, six or seven  
things at a time, but rarely more. For example, if you are working on task  
A, and I interrupt you and put you to task B, and then someone interrupts  
your from B to do C, you can deal with that kind of interruption up to  
about five mental levels before you reach "stack overflow" and all mental  
heck breaks loose.

I think that the item not noticed is unobserved because the reader's  
attention is taken by the mental processing involved in keeping the other  
items in mind. One needs to finish with most items before going on to the  
next. I encounter that when my wife calls me as I'm shopping. She adds one  
item to my mental list. No problem. Then she recites three more, and I  
have to tell her to wait while I get my pen ready, and then to give me the  
entire list all over again. I'd think it might be my age creeping up on  
me, but I've yet to put my eyeglasses in the fridge.

On Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:35:43 -0500, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote: