No, it's mostly based on personal experience. I was looking at how my younger colleagues were organising their screens, with IDE tool windows taking up most of

No, it's mostly based on personal experience. I was looking at how my younger colleagues were organising their screens, with IDE tool windows taking up most of it, and leaving no more than about a quarter of the screen to the source code editor, and comparing it to my own workspace, where the source code takes up most of the screen. And it struck me that 25 years ago my workspace looked more like theirs today than mine today. The scanning bit is the explanation I came up with. Wrt. colour, there's the concept of alarm colours in cognitive psychology. That, at least, should be DDG'able. It's the observation that certain colours, mainly red but also yellow, pull at your attention. This is a hardwired part of human cognition. If there are alarm colours present, then it becomes harder to read the rest of the text, because the alarm colour keeps trying to pull you in.