Out of Sight, Out of Mind 147
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.'"
Re:Open the Door Jeopardy (Score:1, Informative)
Turd Ferguson.
Re:It's quantum-mechanical (Score:5, Informative)
don't you need two doors for that ?
No. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Context-switching matters (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Different conclusion. (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it's pretty obvious really. It's a context switch [wikipedia.org].
In the first place... (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)