Walking Through a Doorway Makes You Forget (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Walking Through a Doorway Makes You Forget (2011)

scientificamerican.com

74 pointsrosser21 comments

A similar thing happens at an ATM when you dispense money before you give the user their card back. They tend to forget the card more often. Apparently this happens because the users goal in that whole process is to get the money, not to get the card back. So as soon as they have their money the forget about the card. Since the user has reached their goal there is no reason not to forget about the state of the task.

That's an interesting take on it. I'd always thought it was because: when ATMs were first introduced, people thought of the cash as more important than the card... Nowadays, I'd say the reverse is true for most people: I've occasionally started to walk away from the machine, stuffing my card into my wallet, only to be drawn back by the whirring sound of the cash counter... People are too set in their ways to reverse it now, but perhaps they could give us both cash and card at the same time?

Giving people their cash and card at the same time would open them up to a scenario where an attacker can just grab whichever they don't reach for first.

You could give them on top of each other so that both can be grabbed simultaneously.

From working a few different jobs in retail, I can say it is not to uncommon for people to walk away after paying, leaving their just-purchased items behind.

That's known as a "post-completion error" - you've finished what you meant to do, like making a photocopy, and then forget to do some follow-up step, like take the original document off the copier.

Most ATMs now in my experience scan & return your card to you at the beginning of the transaction, so you don't forget it in with all the other details.

A similar thing happens in casinos.

A person sits down to play a slot machine but then they turn to their friend to say something. When they turn back to face the slot machine "Where is my money! I put money into it!"

They didn't put any in a review of surveillance video shows they didn't. The customer then looks in the envelope they carry thei cash in and see their money is there.

Mine is somewhat the opposite way - my goal is to ensure I get the card back and then forget about the money :(

A recent episode[1] of the design podcast 99% Invisible talks about how this (or a similar effect) was exploited by Victor Gruen in the design of shopping malls, in what they call Gruen transfer[2].

1. http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-gruen-effect/

2. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer

Surely it takes slightly more concentration to walk through a doorway than across a room. You need to avoid bumping into the walls, make sense of an (initially) reduced field of vision, and take-in new surroundings... The idea that people mentally discard information because they've moved into a different room seems far less likely.

Did the article or researchers say it was just because someone was in a different room? The title is "Walking through a doorway makes you forget" not "You forget because you're in a new room."

In some cultures it is said that dreams are forgotten the moment you look out through a window.

I would be interested in the results of a variation: the participant walks through a door, only to enter the same room they just left (easier to test with the virtual version!) My hypothesis is that, when entering a new environment, the brain immediately has a huge number of stimuli to respond to, and that's what causes the short-term memory loss. Maybe being told in advance that they would re-enter the same room would have an effect.

The article describes exactly this experiment.

Almost, but not exactly: The article describes moving through two doorways, the last one taking the person back to the original room. That's different from passing through a doorway but never entering a new room.

If the "doorway effect" significantly decreased in that scenario, it would strongly suggest that it's the sudden introduction of new surroundings that triggers the memory dump that the article describes, rather than the doorway itself.

I had this idea for a minimal life countdown which is positioned at the exit of your house (eg inside the front door) and shows you how many days left you have in your life each time you leave the house.

Reading this makes me wonder if a better place for it would be somewhere on the outside of your doorway... :)

I use an app called Days Of Life for iOS that does precisely this, at a configurable time every day. I chose 17:00.

I have experimented with an app that always displays a couple of major events in the past and some in the future (including life expectancy) on a timeline. However, after a couple of days I couldn't care less about this information, because it changes so unnoticeably and slowly. It didn't help me at all to get a sense for these time scales.

Not entirely unlike running a garbage collection cycle (or freeing a pool) after each HTTP request...

while not mentioned in the article, it is remarkable that this phenomena is very strongly apparent in dreams, in particular in lucid dreams; an effective way to dramatically change a dream is to walk through a door or a mirror; for example, you are in a distressing situation in your remote village home, you walk out the door to find out you are suddenly in a bustling big city street, you turn around open the door again, and find out it is the door of a restaurant, the previous scene having completely disappeared.

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