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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.'"
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.
Obviously the subjects' brainwaves diffracted when they walked through the door...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Without data to back that claim up you have a nice little anecdote to be added to the pile.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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.
Short term memory is based on neurophysiology of the brain. That's not going to change that much over just a couple decades. Now, the amount of stress that we feel as a result of constantly paging between things would elicit that sort of response. And it's been studied, not conclusively yet, but multitasking is bad.
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
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'
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.
Hundreds of processes happen, going from one room to another. Identifying the door is a good start (walls are so unyielding) looking for the knob, using hand-eye coordination to put hand on doorknob, turn, sense door opens or does not, pulling, pushing, how far is door open, don't hit it going through, see objects in new room, processes information (I didn't walk out into space and plummet like Wile E. Coyote, etc.) then resume walking, assuming you know what you came in for.
Probably at some point they'll use this as a screen for Alzheimers Disease (or early onset dementia.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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*
Your one word response doesn't provide any data. Please provide links to this data you found with google.
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
So those WERE the droids I was looking for?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
He would but he just walked through the door from the bathroom and has forgotten them.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
tl;dr
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Dammit, now I forgot what I came to this website for.
I'd argue that taking stock of the new room is the biggest of those distractors. There's a lot involved when you have to take stock of "new" territory, and it'd be pretty easy for that to distract you. Even if you're familiar with the room, it takes a moment to verify things are as you left them. We're not all that far removed from needing to figure out if there's something waiting to eat us around every corner.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Yes, it's pretty obvious really. It's a context switch.
Context is king in memory. It both helps and hinders. Memories are linked to the place and time where you first learned them. The brain is like a 3 dimensional chording keyboard combined with a hologram combined with photographic film. If you've only seen something once, you'll remember the context. As you see that thing more and more, the context/background gets washed out and all that remains is the pattern of the image/concept. So if you are told to remember the words "fish, piano, disestablishmentarianism, Arizona, and tooth", you are going to tie that pattern to the context you are in. Change the context and it becomes harder to remember.
I wonder if it's cheating to "play back" your conversation with the person who gave you the list?
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!
Our ancestors had about the same memory - they would open the door, get on the floor, and everybody walked the dinosaur.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
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.)
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?
Frank Lloyd Wright exploited this phenomenon in his architecture. If you're familiar with his "compression and release", you're probably also familiar with how dumbstruck a person can get walking into one of his buildings. http://goo.gl/H6ygK
Thank you. I signed in just to say this very same thing, and boom! there you are. Context is important in even short-term memory. The simplest explanation of course is that the presence of the original context provides a rich set of retrieval cues.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
It should probably also be noted that context is very important in data compression, and it doesnt seem unreasonable that brains have evolved to store information efficiently using some of the strategies that we have found successful in compsci.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
We're not all that far removed from needing to figure out if there's something waiting to eat us around every corner.
So which part of Australia are you from?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The phenomenon is that when you move through a doorway that you have some subconscious trigger to forget (you are somewhere else, no need to remember anymore)
This, as well as the original post, are so completely false in logic that I can't even begin to describe it. Ok I will try to begin though.
Of course, people who would be in an experiment, and would go through a door, would have different short term management than those who don't. Going through a door requires some calculations: opening it, closing it, the surprise of the environment of the next room, the risk of walking through the door (what lies beyond is somewhat random before you open the door/cross it, adjustment to the different light/temperature/humidity conditions, and many more.
Those all don't happen consciously, but neither the short term memory is handled consciously. As a direct result, due to these factors all being way more important for the survival of the person, take high priority in the short term memory, with the direct results the test produces...
I haven't read the study, but the details in TFA are insufficient to gauge what is meant by a door. They call it "walking through a doorway" not "operating a door" or such. So the issue is walking into a new room, not operation of a door.
Learn to love Alaska
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.