Saturday 5 April 2014

Memory and open doors

After a meeting or sales demo do you sometimes gather people for a review and get them to recall what happened? If you are trying to get people to recall events or key points you might be better off doing this in the room where the meeting or demo happened.

Research by Gabriel Radvansky at Notre Dame University suggests that memories are stored as a series of successive events. You could almost think of them as chapters in a book. It is easier for us to recall events (or chapters) which just happened. This is fair enough.
However what is interesting in Radvanskys research is that walking through doorways seems to create a new memory episode (or chapter) and therefore making it more difficult to recall details that we literally have left behind in the room (previous chapters).

His research used a virtual reality environment with several rooms containing various objects. When participants entered a room they saw a table and picked up an object, once an object was picked up, they could no longer see it. At the next table (sometimes in the same room) they put down the object and picked up another one. Memory tests were carried out (on what people were carrying) when they entered, left or had been in a room for a while

The research found that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. The authors said "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]".

So if you have ever walked into a room and forgot something, this may explain it. There is another aspect which suggests that we recall information better in the context in which we experienced it. There is a long list or research in this area including the famous Godden and Baddeley study on divers superior recall under water, if they were trained under water.

This could have implications for how we train staff. You may be better for example, training staff at a desk or in the room where they will actually be working. When we study we may be better studying at a desk with the pens and instruments we will have on our desk when we do an exam. If you are rehearsing a demo, do it in the boardroom where you will be presenting, you may recall your lines a bit better.

To get back to where we started, if you have just had an important meeting, interview or conference call, no one leaves the room until they write down the key points and better still have the review there and then in the room. Keep the door closed. If you have another review later, use the same room. 

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