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.'"

Comments

Open the Door Jeopardy

[eldavojohn]

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.
Ken Jennings: I'll start with the category 'I Confess!' for $400, Alex.
Alex Trebek: Very good ... 'His death and subsequent disagreement of heir resulted in the Battle of Hastings.'
*Ken Jennings rings in, opens the door and steps through it*
Ken Jennings: Um ... uh ... um ... I knew it a second ago.
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?

Life Imitates Art, or vice versa?

[RobinEggs]

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.

Context-switching matters

[Caerdwyn]

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

Re:Context-switching matters

[idontgno]

Apparently (parsing TFA's explanation), yeah, it is.

When you walk into a new scene, your brain performs a series of high-priority tasks to update your current situational map. It would be counter to your survival success to ignore new sensory and context information presented by rounding a corner or entering a cave, especially if that sensory information included such things a predators. Even if what you were pondering as you entered the new scene was, for instance, a very innovative way to knap and flake a stone axe that would really impress the Cro-Magnon chicks. Your pre-historic geek-trance will kill you if you wander all unawares into a cave bear den.

As a high-priority background task, this situational integration would preempt cognitive resources, such as forcing a cache dump of short-term memory to populate with new page tables, as it were.

Well, that's my interpretation. Sorry it's not a car analogy or a pizza analogy.

I would think

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Dance Steps

[jamvger]

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".

Re:Common Knowledge

[ozmanjusri]

So those WERE the droids I was looking for?

In the first place...

[dpbsmith]

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.

Re:Common Knowledge

[pfignaux]

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