[HN Gopher] Doorway effect
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Doorway effect
Author : aavshr
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-02-08 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| msoucy wrote:
| I've had to introduce this to my friends at work. Where I sit, I
| can't have my phone with me. So sometimes it'll take me four
| tries to leave the room, grab my phone, and actually remember to
| do the thing that I meant to do. Usually I get back to my desk
| after doomscrolling for a few minutes and remember.
| interroboink wrote:
| I clicked to add a comment, but as soon as the page changed I
| forgot what I was going to write ...
|
| ----
|
| Seriously though, happens to me all the time. Not sure if just
| getting dotty. The connection between spatial presence and memory
| is an interesting one; see also Memory Palaces[1]
|
| It makes me wonder if it's different for people totally blind
| since birth. Is the visual aspect important, or just the
| "spacial-ness"?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| temp0826 wrote:
| I was joking with someone who was asking about getting a
| walking pad for their standing desk that it would be
| psychologically disastrous for this reason, citing the ancient
| Greeks memorizing epic poems by walking places to make memory
| associations. Why would one purposely want to have an
| association made between something as mundane/regular as
| walking with working at a screen?!
| 4hg4ufxhy wrote:
| Wouldn't it be moving through space that would make the
| assosiation, not walking itself?
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| This is extremely amplified when taking psychedelics
| RIMR wrote:
| Yeah, I've walked from my living room to the back yard on
| mushrooms, and the change in mindset was like I'd flown to
| another continent.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Opening a new browser tab and forgetting what I was going to do
| in that tab is a very frequent phenomenon for me.
| csours wrote:
| I have a pad of honest to g-d paper next to my keyboard for
| this exact reason.
|
| Goal for the day: log into a server.
|
| Why is that so complicated? hahahahahaha welcome to the
| corporation.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _The "Doorway Effect" - forgetting why you entered a room_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17328740 - June 2018 (130
| comments)
| CPLX wrote:
| This seems sort of intuitive to me so I'm inclined to believe it,
| but at this point can we really believe any of these sort of pop-
| behavioral studies with interesting quirky effects?
|
| It seems like the entire field is so overwhelmed with fake data
| and bullshit that it's hard to separate anything that might
| actually be real.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is a weird comment. The Wikipedia article has a
| comprehensive list of sources underneath, and the comments on
| this post are full of people saying "this exact thing happens
| to me".
|
| So I'm going to say, yes, we can believe it.
| xattt wrote:
| Consider an acute care facility. Patient care supplies (IV
| bags, IV sets, catheters, dressing supplies) are usually in a
| side room called the supply room.
|
| Ours was in a room behind a doorframe without a door. If I was
| getting dressing supplies in a state of flow/on auto-pilot,
| more often than not, I would blank as soon as I went through
| that doorway and would have to actively think exactly what the
| hell I was there for.
| iwontberude wrote:
| This will be especially true if we have apps and windows that
| appear every time we enter a different room.
| xpe wrote:
| Many psychological studies sound convincing but are hard to
| replicate and/or based on low sample sizes or poor experimental
| design. Seeing a plausible mechanism underlying a theory isn't
| enough. So I'm writing this comment as a placeholder. Who here
| has checked the source studies?
|
| Roughly speaking what is the total number of people in all
| studies pertaining to this claimed effect?
| xpe wrote:
| How is the theory falsifiable? What if I pass between two rooms
| that look identical? Has this been studied? (It seems to me that
| the underlying claim of episodic memory might not be able to tell
| a difference.)
| kansface wrote:
| I only skimmed, but the two linked articles have ~50 participants
| or _fewer_ (college students) for each.
| epistasis wrote:
| Meaning that the effect must be fairly strong to be observable
| in two studies with n=50?
|
| I would agree in general, but I would like to see three or
| more, as well as variations to test the boundaries of this.
|
| Things can go wrong in one or two studies, so having
| independent replication is needed to really cement things.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if
| walking or not) helps enormously.
|
| For me it happens that I'm doing something on my phone, remember
| to do something else, switch apps to do it, and literally forget
| what it is. But by going back or checking the recent apps I find
| again the "trigger" of the original reminder.
|
| For example, you are checking [social network] and you see a post
| that reminds you to go searching for [object]. You close the app,
| open the browser...and you try to remember what were you going to
| search. Just going back and seeing the social network posts you
| were watching will remind you again of it.
|
| It's like the though's owner is the other situation/room, and as
| soon as you forget one you forget the other with it. Quite
| interesting
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if
| walking or not) helps enormously.
|
| Definitely. My wife and I have a running joke about it. I'll
| walk into the room, she says "What's up?" and I say "trying to
| find something and I forgot what it was. Hold on, let me go
| back to my office to remember."
| layer8 wrote:
| Ah, this is explains the effect of entering a room and not
| remembering why you went there.
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