Quote:
Originally Posted by RRW
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It's not a matter of optical perception. It's a matter of necessary mental focus and understanding of what it is you perceive. I can open 6 videos and put them in cascade while talking on the phone, that doesn't mean I am actively WATCHING them or even that I had the ability to watch them in the first place. Searching in Start menu is mainly an audiovisual task (yes it's audio, too, you read words, you cannot but pronounce them in your head), watching a video is a different audiovisual task (unless you have it on mute). Unless you have the brain of a genius or are an idiot savant, you cannot pay full attention to different tasks of the same type going on at the same time, you are bound to start losing relevant information when your focus shifts from one task to the other. Sure the video just MIGHT draw your attention away from the menu search if a stimulus manages to trigger your attention back, but just for the record, a brain's immediate processing ability is rather limited.
But just in case, the time it took you shifting to your start menu task isn't really that different from the time it took you to open the Start screen and type. The only thing you can't do with the Start Screen as opposed to the Start menu is leave the screen EXACTLY like the screenshot (ie have it ready but not use the application and go back to watching the video). Then again, why would anyone want to do that?