Scroll Blindness

The state by which a human being is blind to meaningful information as the information is going by too fast or in too complex a form. http://junit.sourceforge.net/doc/cookbook/cookbook.htm

I created this page to find out more on the psychology behind the context of ScrollBlindness. I.e. the rapid inundation of factual information that so many programmers have to deal with. I noticed some psychologists that frequent these pages, and I wonder what they would have to say ... (hint... hint) ... Are there studies into the lives of programmers that could add depth to this term/concept? Any cognitive psychologist care to comment?

It seems, that if the scrolling is under the control of the reader, quite fast scrolling is possible. But this same speed can be completely overloading someone, whom you want to show something within the scrolled text.

I have experienced this in both positions:

I was trying to follow code scrolled by a fellow programmer and had quite some trouble when be scrolled back and forth.
My wife got increasingly nervous as I scrolled her text, she wanted to show me, while searching something I wanted to explain her in it.

Does this also refer to the weird artifact, at least on NetBeans on Linux, where, if a textbox has too many lines, the graphics glitch out and you can't actually read stuff correctly?

See InformationOverload