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Using the English language, given two sentences that say the same thing, what makes one more readable than the other? Usually terseness while retaining clarity and removing ambiguity. The exact same things make code more readable. Remove everything that doesn't add anything, but don't remove things that do add information. And avoid ambiguity. In code, we ...

I've studied this a little bit within the context of timing responses to personality test items. General models of reading speed look at both the time to read the words as well as to comprehend. From memory, eye tracking studies have shown how the eyes will often back track to confusing parts of a sentence (apologies for lack of reference). Some general ...

It's been known that Increased Corpus Callosum size was found in musicians who began music training before age 7 and that Training working memory leads to growth in Corpus Callosum. As for how to train working memory, that's a diverse subject. There have been a lot of experiments involving Training working memory for ADHD patients, however a meta-analysis ...

This answer is a bit more anecdotal, but perhaps it's useful. From the perspective of an academic researcher (which perhaps is similar to Einstein's perspective), there is a balance between reading the literature and conducting your own research. There is a balance between learning new skills and applying those skills to your own projects. Even within the ...

In general, parental involvement/engagement has lots of positive social, emotional, cognitive, and academic effects for a child's development. Some evidence suggests that the positive effects of relatively general factors like improved parent-child relationship, increasing motivation and (positive) expectations, etc., are stronger than the specific benefits ...

If you really wanted to know you could use models of reading behaviour - e.g. EZ-Reader or Swift. The Rayner reviews are the classic go-to to outlne this kind of thing: Rayner, K. (2009). Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006) (Vol. 62, pp. 1457-506). It will ...

A few thoughts spring to mind: Part of the answer might depend on the maximum value of X (if all the messages are relatively short, that's a key piece of information). It doesn't decay, I don't think. The more information presented to the user, the more it all has to put into context with each other. But I don't think it's quadratic, either; that seems ...

Yes, inhibiting sub-vocalization is likely to impair comprehension. Here is the abstract from Slowiaczek & Clifton (1980): Two experiments demonstrated that subvocalization is of value in reading for certain types of meaning. Blocking subvocalization by requiring subjects to count or say “cola-colacola …” aloud impaired their reading comprehension ...

My understanding was that at least some sub-vocalisation is a normal part of reading and writing. The wikipedia article on subvocalisation cites several sources supporting that claim. The article also claims that there is no evidence to suggest that speed reading training that involves suppression of sub-vocalisation is effective. There is also evidence that ...

This is my current area of research (I'm a Ph.D. student in computer science and cognitive science). Like you said, there are a large number of readability/complexity metrics, but very little research trying to quantify what makes a piece of code psychologically complex. For more information on qualitative studies and models, I'd highly recommend the 2001 ...

These dots are known as pips. Pip placement tends to follow a convention, but this placement may vary by region, as you can see by this comparison between Western and Asian dice (from wikipedia): I suspect this arrangement has nothing to do with cognitive science or usability, but is simply a convention. However, you may note that on the Western-style ...

Looking at google: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/dyslexia-iq-0923.html I know several dyslexic researchers in computer science and cognitive psychology/neuroscience suffering of big difficulties with spelling for example. I think they that are arguably intelligent despite of the dyslexia ! As for the IQ tests, you should keep in mind that some modules ...

I don't know if it's possible to train the corpus callosum, but aside from that, I don't think you can read text in the left visual field for longer than a fraction of a second. To be able to read or see something in your left visual field, your eyes must be focused on something to the right of that (Imagine a fixation cross in the middle of a PC screen ...

It sounds like you're talking about Latent Semantic Analysis. Here's their rundown of what it is. However, LSA as currently practiced has some additional limitations. It makes no use of word order, thus of syntactic relations or logic, or of morphology. Remarkably, it manages to extract correct reflections of passage and word meanings quite well without ...