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:It's quantum-mechanical (Score:4, Insightful)
don't you need two doors for that ?
Context-switching matters (Score:5, Insightful)
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
I would think (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Context-switching matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh hell yeah. Is the door pull or push? Can I lift the handle, or do I have to push it down?
And don't even get me started on automatic doors. You need differential calculus to walk through them properly: is the door going to be wide enough open for me to get through it at my present speed, given a low threshold of detection, or am I going to pull a Bieber and smash my face into it?
Re:Different conclusion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common Knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
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...