What wipes in Star Wars teach us about the brain and also interface design (Interconnected):

The brain has a limited amount of resources, so it has to choose what’s going to be regarded and what’s going to be ignored. The feeling of this resource allocation is what we call attention.

This seems to match with my experience.. From a technical point of view this was the point of the doorway transitions in Resident Evil, but narratively it really worked well too.