The Psychology of Quality and More

C Style: Standards and Guidelines (contents)

CHAPTER 2 : Psychological Factors

PART 1 : BASICS

CHAPTER 2 : Psychological Factors

2.1 Pattern Recognition
2.2 Filtering
2.3 Habit
2.4 Redundancy
2.5 Cues and Context
2.6 Recognizing Basic features
2.7 Short Term, Working and Long Term memory
2.8 Chunking
2.9 The Rule of Seven
2.10 Context Switching
2.11 Modifying the image
2.12 Memorizing sounds
2.13 Eye focus
2.14 Eye movement
2.15 Looking ahead
2.16 Looking back
2.17 The subconscious is always right
2.18 Natural ambition
2.19 Summary

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2.12 Memorizing sounds

Another interesting point is that when we memorize words, we remember their sound too. Then when we try to recall the word the sound is the clearest memory. Thus you may recognize 'F' correctly, but you are more likely to recall it as 'X' than the visually and lexically more similar 'E'. This also leads to us being able to remember more words from a list if they sound distinctly different.

The programming analogy is that variable names that sound alike are likely to be confused.

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