

Walking Through a Doorway Makes You Forget (2011) - rosser
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/

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mschwaig
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.

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gojonnygogogogo
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?

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Rifu
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.

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

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tomkinstinch
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/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-gruen-effect/)

2\.
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer)

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gojonnygogogogo
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.

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darkxanthos
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."

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

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oneeyedpigeon
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.

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wanderingstan
The article describes exactly this experiment.

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breadbox
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.

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3stripe
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... :)

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

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rndn
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.

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

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nirai
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.

