Web Users Judge Sites Instantly

Ant writes "This Nature.com news article reports that potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds: 'Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions...'"

Comments

Oh Dear

[HotmanParisHiltonKam]

Quoth TFA "Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny."

The human reaction time is about .25 seconds. This study erronseously assumes that the judgement is made during the time the image is displayed - of course, the image retention time on the eye end the lasting photographic imprint on the memory means that the judgement can happen well after the image is gone.

Re:Oh Dear

[SnowZero]

You are definitely on the right track, though its not clear if its the article summary that's botched or the study itself. Trained cognitive psychologists at least should know better, so I'd lean toward an innacurate summary. The title should probably read "users can judge websites after seeing them for only 50 msec". The "photographic" effect you are referring to is called after-image, and can last long after the initial stimulus is gone. They could make a stronger claim than I stated above if they put up a visual distraction image after the 50 msec (visual memory studies do this a lot). But the summary doesn't mention it so we can't know for sure.

Regarding human reaction time, it varies depending on the task, but rarely is less than 100 msec (usually when you expect something to happen, such as runners starting a race). That means some tasks can be completed faster than 250 msec thouch, so that's not a good lower bound to quote if you are trying to debunk something. 50 msec certainly is too fast for anything I'd call "judgement" though, as people usually cannot even press a button that fast in response to an event.

At any rate, the slashdot summary is far from an accurate description of the phenomenon, but since when is that news...

P.S. I am not a psychologist, but I do have a B.S. double in cognitive science.

Re:They shut that one down.

[Morlark]

Actually, the goatse.ca mirror is incomplete. It lacks a great deal of content that goatse.cx (and goat.cx) had. The most complete goatse mirror you are likely to find is goatse.ragingfist.net

Re:Web Site Peeves

[Justin205]

Hint for Firefox users... about:config -> browser.blink_allowed

Set it to false. It unfortunately defaults to true, at least on 1.0.7.

Re:Funny...

[gangien]

as a funny offtopic info. apparently playboy mirrors files for eclipse, apache, freebsd, and some other stuff! coolness. I fuond this out in some other article clicking around. look for yourself