According to a recent study in
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, the reason you sometimes find yourself forgetting what you're looking for might have more to do with architecture than you realize. It seems that memory is affected by the number of rooms and doorways that you travel through:
When Professor Radvansky gave a group of students a series of different
colored objects to remember, and then asked them to either cross a room
or pass through a doorway into another room, the subjects showed
differences in memory. Even though the participants traveled the exact
same distances, they exhibited a decline in memory when they went
through a doorway.
The researchers think this has something to do with the fact that we "construct mental narratives to organize and retain information" and, according to the article:
When we cross through an event boundary we parse one event into two.
Next, we foreground the most current event. If we then try to retrieve
information that was carried over the event horizon, the two events
compete and interfere with each other.
Interesting stuff!
Thanks Michael for sharing this exciting article. It's interesting to see, again, how influenced/shaped we are by the environment we are surrounded by. I especially like how "The divisions help keep the organization of our mental narratives more stable and easier to remember" - I always say that! :0)
ReplyDeleteSo here's the part I dislike: "By aiding the mental narratives that we construct to navigate the world, architects’ designs will be more salient, and perhaps more memorable to those that inhabit them."
ReplyDeleteIs architecture for the sake of architecture e.g. as an art, what we should be seeking? Or should we be trying to make it possible for people to live and work and negotiate the tasks of their daily lives more effectively? Seems that we are once again inverting the task... Anyone care to weigh in on this?