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Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

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Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#11

Post by swader999 »

So a low frills just the code IDE is better for ADHD. Wonder if single monitor and even single code pane at a time also boosts an ADHD brains productivity. Suspect it does.

Another aspect of focus is fixation on a specific physical space with lowered blink rate. As soon as you move your eyes away or blink it lowers your concentration. The text outside of this cone of sight is less sharp. It's like a hunter that finds its prey in a landscape. Seems obvious when you think about it but we rarely consider this when designing our office and workflow.

Edit: love all the replies to this, lots to consider that could really help.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#12

Post by pjerem »

agroot12 wrote: post #6

"After that, participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging)" ... this is a surprising take. Debugging, as the saying goes, is often like a murder mystery. Edit: I dont' think the authors are wrong about that, since they have observed the participants, I assume they chose a monotonous debugging task.

I’ve been surprised by this too.

Maybe it’s a personal preference after all but my ADHD brain for sure prefers debugging.

Debugging is sometimes more challenging and the boundaries are clearly defined : you know how the program should behave and you know when you get it. You know what doesn’t work so it’s easy to go TDD : when the test is green you are good to go !

Whereas writing new code is a pain for my dopamine system because I never know when it’s done.

Getting the boring feature to work is easy but finishing is horrible.

Figuring if you managed every edge cases, if you wrote enough tests, if you respected the team defined architecture, that’s hard.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#13

Post by dtx1 »

McPepper wrote: post #2

From my own personal experience, it would explain why when I use window managers like i3wm and Yabai versus regular desktop that I am more effective and efficient. Somehow window managers just fits perfectly like glove for my brain. I don't get that cognitive load overhead when I have million different tabs and windows and programs and notes just splattered in a single screen. It's all neatly hidden away until I need…

I'm not diagnosed with ADHD though it's likely that I have a mild form of it. I also use sway exclusively (Wayland i3) and couldn't bear to use anything else at this point.

Though my experience is the opposite, sway allows me to represent the cluttered state of my mind perfectly and to quickly ad-hoc reorder my open windows and gazillion tabs for what I am currently focussing on. It's always chaos but in a comfy way.

Quite interesting to see how different our usage seems to be, for many people tiling window manager help keep order, for me it enables me to survive in a constant state of chaos until i am running out of RAM

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#14

Post by pjerem »

swader999 wrote: post #11

So a low frills just the code IDE is better for ADHD. Wonder if single monitor and even single code pane at a time also boosts an ADHD brains productivity. Suspect it does. Another aspect of focus is fixation on a specific physical space with lowered blink rate. As soon as you move your eyes away or blink it lowers your concentration. The text outside of this cone of sight is less sharp. It's like a hunter that finds…

My natural workflow is everything full goes full screen. It’s sometimes painful on Windows but on Mac, it’s a breeze to switch full screen apps with the trackpad.

But I’ve got the combo of myopia + ADHD so I naturally prefer little screens (like 13 to 15“). I acknowledge that everything full screen on a 30" screen is pretty painful.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#15

Post by water9 »

rahen wrote: post #10

This reminds me of how Rob Pike mentioned his dislike for syntax coloring as extra cognitive load, which seems odd in regards to current IDEs filled with information and stimuli. With LLMs now directly interfaced to IDEs, it is likely that any obstacle will trigger a need for immediate AI powered dopamine reward. I wonder how programmers brains are going to rewire in this regard, even for those not subject to ADHD, b…

IMO syntax coloring lessens the cognitive load. What is "high level code". You are telling a machine what to do and to do it as fast as possible. Can you still make money telling a machine what to do but not as fast, depends but most likely. We code to ultimately make money in one form or another. Whether you keep that money or put it towards altruistic causes is independent of the shared commonality.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#16

Post by dkh »

As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer" where while I can understand (and design and implement) very complex things, it is easy for me to flounder when debugging if I feel unable to visually see or mentally hold the entire problem in my head at once. This is especially true if the code isn't mine.

It is for this reason that I try to write what I feel is very obvious or self-explanatory code, why I try to keep functions/modules as simple as possible and ideally not longer in length than I can see on my screen at once (when possible), and why I almost exclusively join small/new teams who don't yet have an enormous codebase that I'll have to wrap my head around. I am never done tweaking the UIs of the editors I use to maximize my ability to work around these things.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#18

Post by extasia »

water9 wrote: post #15
rahen wrote: post #10

This reminds me of how Rob Pike mentioned his dislike for syntax coloring as extra cognitive load, which seems odd in regards to current IDEs filled with information and stimuli. With LLMs now directly interfaced to IDEs, it is likely that any obstacle will trigger a need for immediate AI powered dopamine reward. I wonder how programmers brains are going to rewire in this regard, even for those not subject to ADHD, b…

IMO syntax coloring lessens the cognitive load. What is "high level code". You are telling a machine what to do and to do it as fast as possible. Can you still make money telling a machine what to do but not as fast, depends but most likely. We code to ultimately make money in one form or another. Whether you keep that money or put it towards altruistic causes is independent of the shared commonality.

We should organise a study of our own: does syntax highlighting help or hinder and does the answer change based on your level of ADHD traits.

Could be quite interesting!

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#19

Post by extasia »

agroot12 wrote: post #6

"After that, participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging)" ... this is a surprising take. Debugging, as the saying goes, is often like a murder mystery. Edit: I dont' think the authors are wrong about that, since they have observed the participants, I assume they chose a monotonous debugging task.

From what I skim read the debugging task involved finding places where the wrong type of indentation was used (python)

So I'd describe it as pretty monotonous, even if most debugging isn't!

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#20

Post by bestouff »

dkh wrote: post #16

As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…

Hey you are a younger version of me ! I completely agree, and I am now very selective wrt where and with who I work and I still love my job.
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