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Out of Sight, Out of Mind
PerlJedi writes "Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have conducted a very simple study, with some surprising (or at least amusing) results about how our short term memory works. Quoting: 'Sometimes, to get to the next object the participant simply walked across the room. Other times, they had to walk the same distance, but through a door into a new room. From time to time, the researchers gave them a pop quiz, asking which object was currently in their backpack. The quiz was timed so that when they walked through a doorway, they were tested right afterwards. As the title said, walking through doorways caused forgetting: Their responses were both slower and less accurate when they'd walked through a doorway into a new room than when they'd walked the same distance within the same room.'"
This is why memory heuristics work by combining location with data
Alex Trebek: Good evening and welcome to another edition of "Open the Door Jeopardy" where contestants must step through a door after ringing in and answer because answering a 'clue' in the form of a question just isn't confusing enough. Ken Jennings, as our returning champion you start. ... 'His death and subsequent disagreement of heir resulted in the Battle of Hastings.' ... uh ... um ... I knew it a second ago.
Ken Jennings: I'll start with the category 'I Confess!' for $400, Alex.
Alex Trebek: Very good
*Ken Jennings rings in, opens the door and steps through it*
Ken Jennings: Um
Alex Trebek: Ooooh, I'm sorry, time is up. Anyone else?
*the heavy treads of IBM's Watson machine crush the door as it rolls in*
Watson: Who was Edward the Confessor?
My work here is dung.
Doesn't seem like it's doorways or line of sight, but changing rooms is like turning a new page in ones mind. New room, new collection of objects, new page of memory to work with.
That's how I feel it works in my own mind in any case.
There is so much competition for our attention such as TV, iPods, cellphones, computers that our short term memory capacity has collapsed to the duration of the average TV commercial scene, which is somewhere below 2 seconds.
In other words 200 years ago this forgetfulness would not have been an issue.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Obviously the subjects' brainwaves diffracted when they walked through the door...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So many famous quotes talk about the gravity of "walking through that door", about the hope of "opening a new door" or "closing a door...opening a window" that I wonder how much people associate doors metaphorically with permission to forget and ignore everything on the other side?
Of course, ancient Greeks used architecture, specifically an image of a large house, to remember things: a common technique to plan and memorize a speech was to lay it out visually in your head, each room representing a major topic and each door perhaps representing a transition or gravid point. So architecture as memory cuts both ways.
Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.
It's one of the reasons why I've always insisted upon having at least one guaranteed-uninterrupted (nothing short of "the building's on fire... again") two-hour block of time per day in any tech job I have. If I don't have that, don't complain to me that I write bad code, but DO expect me to gripe about it in my status and my supervisor evaluation.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys, time, re, LeaveMeTheFuckAlone
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
This is why I hate going to meetings and feeling stupid. Come to my cube and I'll know the answers.
I would think this is due to the brain first checking the next room. It being a new place, we probably want to be well aware of the room before being too far in. Thus our attention is taken away from whatever we are thinking about a minute ago.
I this why I forget what I needed whenever I walk into the next room?
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
This must be why I kept forgetting whether or not I had a lamp in my inventory.
Changing mental focus causes forgetting. Can you multi-thread?
Walking across room: : Command: Get blue pencil trudge trudge trudge See: pencils Take: blue one. w00t!
Walking across room, through door: : Command: Get green string trudge trudge trudge See: Door Look for: Knob Act: Turn knob Act: Push door Door does not open. Act: Pull door Door opens trudge trudge trudge Halt. Query: What am I in here for? Pencil? Chair? Left-handed widget extractor? Rope? Hook? Trebuchet? Keys? Potrzebie? Fail!
I frequently find distraction breaks my thread of thought and I lose the frayed thread end. Rather like going up stairs - "Uh. What did I come up here for?" Go downstairs - "Uh. What did I come down here for?" I've been doing this ever since I spent 20 minutes searching my parents house for the screwdriver I was holding in my hand all the time - I was about 12 years old at the time - I'm an expert in this field!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As the title said, walking through doorways caused forgetting
I could see how that would be a survival instinct. When you cross a barrier into another space, job one for your brain is taking stock of where you are and processing possible threats. It's not that you forget what you have in your hand, your brain has merely busy with another set of priorities.
When our ancestors moved from the cover of the woods to a grassy meadow, when they entered a cave, or rounded the bend of a river they were effectively going through a door to another space. The surviving human brains would have been attuned to both threats and opportunities, which would be a priority processing task kicked off by crossing the barrier threshold.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's a very weird phenomenon... like deja-vu in reverse.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Subject: I think that door just sighed.
Experimenter: Ghastly, isn't it? All the doors on this experiment have been programmed to have a cheery and sunny disposition. Now, how many objects in your backpack?
Subject: Uh, really? That's, uh ... I'm sorry, what? Ah, I forget... what?
Experimenter: *scribbles on clibpoard*
It is well known that when learning a new dance step, it is much easier to keep the room in the same orientation when rehearsing it. One gets particularly confused trying the step facing another direction before the step begins to be committed to muscle memory. Dancers call it "room memory".
The glass is half glass.
After you have some unpleasant experience -- break up with your girlfriend, argument with your boss -- just walk into another room and start doing something else
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
How unfortunate that EU is running out of money and might no longer be able to fund such truly brilliant research.
We must have some common sequences with dogs or cats.
Forgetting is a very important skill -- it's a big huge part of something that we call focus.
With the exception of completely arbitrary doors, I'd argue that every door our there separates two head-spaces for a damn good reason.
The experiment that you want to do next is to see if crossing back through the doorway re-strengthens the original memory. I would hope that it not only restrengthens the original memory, but that the original memory winds up being stronger after returning through the door (that's two door passes) than it would have been had the door not been there (that's two non-door passes).
So when do you set aside your current head-space for a new one?
Malls have known this forever. It's called the Gruen Transfer.
Next.
Some people are better at this and some better at that. I couldn't find numbers mentioned in the scientist article, only that "Memory was worse", not how much worse, in whatever sense, for how many people, for which people, etc.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
There is a lot to criticize in life, but this study is not one.
In the first place, this has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks, in the form of the memorization technique known as the "method of loci." Rhetoricians memorized their speeches by associating each part of the speech with a room in their house, and as they gave the speech would mentally walk through the house. This is in fact the source of our expressions "in the first place," "in the second place," etc.
In the second place... uh... I forgot what I was going to say.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When I loaded the new room, the old one get LRUed.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Excerpt: Legend says that Simonides of Ceos was the inventor of the method of loci where large amounts of data can be remembered in order by placing images that represent the data into mental locations or journeys.
The story goes there was a building collapse at a dinner party, killing everyone but Simonides (who had stepped out to receive a messenger). Anyway, the bodies were unidentifiably crushed but Simonides was able to identify the victims based on where they had been sitting.
Interesting in that it uses spatial memory, something humans are pretty good at, to associate arbitrary facts. (This stuff was cutting edge data management until the renaissance.)
Translated into Russian and back: Invisible Vodka.
Better (and supposedly true): Hydraulic Ram - ? - Water Sheep. Baah!
If your teacher said what was your excuse this time for late homework, you say "blame your door right there, it is the cause of my memory loss."
I think another study, done with a different looking room accessible around a corner, and through an open corridor, would produce similar results. Your mind has to process the new location, and I don't believe it matters so much what the transport method is to get there. Perhaps even a trial where they made the person close their eyes and walk in place for a similar amount of time and then ever so slightly changed his surroundings (moved the chair 3 inches, the clock 2 inches, etc) would produce similar results. Glad people are still working on reverse engineering the heuristics our brains use...
No doors. When I run my business I want my employees to be ahead of the game. Everything will be open to everyone all the time. There will be no 4 sided objects or anything that even resemble a doorway in fact. My employees will be the best! On an unrelated note, anyone know of an open field for sale in Kansas?
But that might have been in a different room...
Anyway, the title "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" reminded me of the early translation engines, which translated it to "Invisible, Idiot".
The walrus ignored me, so I ignored him, kept on going and was eaten by a grue :(
I am find myself in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike...
Is that you Hank?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And the door is triple sized so the blind doesn't even know he walked through a door. What if it's a normal size door and he felt that he walked through something but being blind from birth, the door concept must have been real different from us.
Are they better at remembering things?
What if they change the experiment to automatic doors, glass vs. wood, etc. It'd be interesting.
The reverse seems to also be true. People with better memories can be oblivious to their surroundings (and to other people).
This just in: Going to the bathroom during an exam may make you forget all of your test answers!
Parents now lobbying for open-air bathrooms to ensure fair test-taking.
Of course! This explains Maxwell Smart's apparent cognitive issues!
This is why memory heuristics work by combining location with data
Assembly programmers call it context switching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_switch
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If this research is validated, then there may be implications for UI design...
Gnome 3, for example, works using an application space focus, rather than a window focus. In one way that's quite appealing - it gives you full focus on the task at hand without the distraction of the 12 other programs you are running at the same time. The problem that lots of people have reported/commented on is that it makes it very difficult to be task focused when a task involves more than one program. Part of this may be to do with the doorway context switch impeding short term memory retention on the task at hand.
I've used Gnome 3 as an example, but it's far from alone; Metro & Apple full-screen apps spring to mind, though there's a mitigation with Apple full-screen in that it's not forced upon you.
I wonder if there's a way to enjoy the focus of application-centricity without the disadvantages? For instance, I can imagine keeping a map of the other applications visible, or a representation of the overall desktop/workspace, as you move th'rough the doorway between applications, and/or as you work in an application space. (Slashdot, you may want to vote this up so that it isn't deleted when this item is archived, so that there's some evidence of prior art when large megacorp tries to patent this UI idea.)
Something like that might be enough to jog short term memory and stop the context loss.
Or of course, we could decide that window centric works best, but work on ways to easily group windows into tasks.
Workspaces/Desktops are one way to accomplish this. The problem that I find with workspaces is that they are a clumsy way to manage tasks when I have an application that spans different tasks. But on the other hand, actively managing windows by marking and grouping them introduces unwelcome management overhead.
I would welcome a system whereby windows and applications were grouped together, either automatically or on the cue of the user, by virtue of the fact that they had been used together. (Again - oh no megacorp! - more prior art! ) For instance, one embodiment of this might be to group windows or applications based on the transfer of info between them. Cut and paste for example shows a transfer of info, and could be used as an indicator of affinity.
The story goes that at the height of the cold war DARPA was working on some machine language translation software. English to Russian and Russian to English. When the felt that they had finally got it right they set the system up to take a phrase in English, translate it to Russian, and then translate that back to English to see how closely the phrases matched.
The first researcher stepped up to the console and typed in: "Out of sight, out of mind."
The computer returned: "An invisible lunatic."
Sorry, seemed like the right time to tell that one...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
This is one of the effects that one can experience quite strong on LSD. Entering a new room and realising what's in there and what's happening in the room can take quite a while.
Isn't it possible that walking through the door and being faced with a quiz caused them to forget - and not just walking through the door alone?
I bet that entering a given room helps reload memories pertaining to that room. Especially if that room has a distinctive smell.
I find getting run over by my shopping cart seems to wake them up....
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