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The “Doorway Effect” – forgetting why you entered a room
- moogly 8y agoThere must be something wrong with me, because I don't recognise myself in this at all. I'm not sure I've ever experienced this.
- k__ 8y agoMaybe you live under a bridge? ;)
- allthenews 8y agoPerhaps you've just forgotten.
- sxv 8y agoMarijuana can solve this for you.
- Bizarro 8y agohaha
- npunt 8y agoThis is the same phenomenon as when you open your phone and for a brief moment you don't remember why you did. With phones its worse because all the pretty icons confuse and beckon you to fall back on opening whatever app you habitually open when bored. This property of our cognition is why we should better scaffold intentionality into our devices, though that is an difficult design challenge.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- meko 8y agoI fight the 'pretty icons' syndrome by using monochrome / white on black icon theme. It really helps.
- cimmanom 8y agoI've grayscaled my phone too... but when tired, I can almost physically feel the attraction of icon shapes that my brain links to dopamine rewards. It's awful.
- sundvor 8y agoOh I'll open the phone with the intention to do something, do something else because shiny, then realise the moment I lock the phone and put it away. On particularly bad days, a couple of cycles have been needed...
- okket 8y agoA human 'context switch' seems to be equally expensive as for a computer.
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoMemory evolved (at least in mammals) to tie together places, smells and [proto]emotions. The connection is still quite present in humans. There are many examples: going for a walk clears your mind more than being indoors. Smells and flavors reconnect to places & so on...
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoAnd yet we design open-plan offices around the central theme that people working in a concentration-demanding field should orient their every moment of work around the assumption that not only are context switches costless, but that “collaboration” only happens if everyone is constantly preemptible according to the capricious judgment of managers and other colleagues who are not in a position to even judge the importance of the current task the person being interrupted is working on.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago>"[Y]et we design open-plan offices around the central theme [...]" Surely the theme is control and superiority. You go in the cube farm so that someone can control you and remain superior over you. I doubt people do it because they did time and motion studies and found it more conducive to your particular work?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoSure, but then you are not paid for productivity, and we should speak plainly about this.
- mr__y 8y agobut at the same time it's significantly less reliable for humans - quite often some or all data from "registers" is lost during the context switch
- cjcampbell 8y agoCall it ADHD or what you want, but I tend to experience this a bit more than most people I know. Applying to tech, it's the number one reason Windows 8 didn't work for me. The loss of context when the start screen took over was too disorienting.
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoWorking with a couple coworkers is pretty frustrating because their window management strategy is switching rapidly between active OSX screens with the whole wipe animation too.
- have_faith 8y agoThis is my setup. Single app/window full screened and sliding between them. I like to focus on one thing at once. Tiling window managers are cognitive overload for me, too much going on at once.
- jacobush 8y agoI tried but I die a little each time the swipe animation happens. The Amiga way worked great for me. 1/60s switch time, no animation, fullscreen. Wish MacOS could do away with the animation. Is there a way to config that?
- Heliosmaster 8y agoIf you simply Alt+Tab away there shouldn't be animation.
- jacobush 8y agoThat doesn't do anything at all on my Mac...
- ThrustVectoring 8y agoyeah, it's the swipe animation. I use tmux and instant keyboard shortcuts to swap panes.
- reallymental 8y agoIt's context switching, I face this daily due to my OCD. The damn doorways are always a problem. I'm not very well versed on this subject, but have there been any experiments conducted with a doorway in the middle of a basketball court or a field? I'm sure that would mess me up for a good couple of minutes as well. It's not just doorways that lead to a different room, it's just the fact that there's a doorway present, that changes my context of things. Maybe I'm the weird one.
- WiseWeasel 8y agoI'd watch doorwayball. I'm picturing basketball with a slightly larger court, a canvas wall suspended down the center strapped down around three doorways evenly spaced from the edges, six players per team on the court, and maybe some round padded platforms centered behind the free-throw lines for extra terrain strategy. There'd be some kind of rule similar to dribbling to prevent standing in doorways; something like, you can only stop or take more than two steps in a doorway zone if you've got the ball.
- simcop2387 8y agoGates on large fences might work for this too then. Be a good middle ground for testing. A larger chain link fence with a gate so you can still see both sides
- stordoff 8y agoInterestingly I find that doorways _help_ with my OCD - moving to another room helps me move on from my obsessions.
- tniemi 8y agoI personally think that people unconsciouslly hated the start menu of Windows 8 because of this phenomenom. You open it and the whole screen changes. Worst possible UI.
- cma 8y agoThey recently screwed up the task switcher UI. Iff you turn off all the Timeline stuff, half of the UI is long wordy text about turning back on the Timeline. Every time you Win-tab.
- ggchappell 8y agoThat's an interesting observation. The problem -- if it is one -- is certainly not limited to the Win 8 Start menu. There are plenty of interfaces where pressing a button, or some similar action, pops up a new full-screen or nearly full-screen UI element that looks & works differently from what was there before. I wonder whether any research has been done on whether this makes any significant number of users forget what they were doing. If not, I think such research would be worthwhile.
- hoosieree 8y agoMacOS does this, albeit less intrusively, with full screen apps. (Note that "full screen" means no window chrome, which is different from "maximized".) Normal task switching is near instantaneous, but full screen apps add about 0.3 seconds of animation to their switch. It's enough to break my concentration, so I end up rarely using full screen even though I prefer it for most apps.
- drb91 8y agoAs someone who just started using windows for the first time, doesn’t the little search box essentially replace the start menu? How are people expected to find their app—manually clicking through a bunch of menus to one they are looking for? Assuming they have NOT pinned it to the dock at the bottom.
- pcdoyle 8y ago
- tejtm 8y agoMy wife refers to this as "Male refrigerator blindness" It is also why I prefer the NASA mission control approach to monitor layout
- Bizarro 8y agoI'm assuming you mean "honey, I can't find X", and she comes in a finds X sitting right in front of you". I attribute that to myself as, "I don't want to spend more than 15 seconds looking for this thing inside some random thing behind a door"....usually for me, some cabinet or shelf behind the bathroom door where the towels and a myriad of other stuff are. Also, we're guys and tend to play dumb;)
- jexah 8y agoPretty sure parent meant that one wants something, opens the fridge, and then immediately forgets what one wanted. Not sure this is specific to males, though. In my experience it's been pretty evenly distributed between the sexes.
- crooked-v 8y ago> It is also why I prefer the NASA mission control approach to monitor layout Could you elaborate?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tedmiston 8y agoYou don't have to context switch desktops because you have so many displays that everything you need is already visible.
- nickjj 8y agoFunny enough I recently wrote about this topic in the context of sticking with 80 characters per line when writing code[0]. There's a section on "Context Switching Sucks". I've always fantasized about having all of the walls in my home office as being monitors. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/80-characters-per-line-is-a-standard-worth-sticking-to-even-today https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/80-characters-per-line-is-a-s...
- kartan 8y agoI lived in a one-room (plus bathroom) apartment for half a year. It was an awful experience. The apartment was very well designed with nice furniture and very very centric. But it felt claustrophobic. I have lived since then in similar apartments, equally small, but with at least 2 rooms (living room and bedroom). It feels so much better. At first, one-room looks like is going to be better. There is more space as you don't have inner walls. But when you play games, watch tv, cook and sleep all in the same room it feels that there is something wrong. Getting up in the morning, leaving the bedroom and going to the living room makes a big difference. The context-switching is welcome. It is also easier when going to sleep.
- felipemnoa 8y agoTo each their own I guess. I for one love studios.
- db48x 8y agoYea, I doubt that it's universal. Most humans who ever existed probably lived in a one-room house of some type or other.
- tjoff 8y agoI don't recognize those issues. The two problems I saw were getting it dark enough to sleep (wasn't hard but was a bit of a chore, automated blinds would have helped) and noise from the refrigerator, but that's pretty much it.
- crooked-v 8y agoYou forgot to mention putting duct tape over all the unbearably bright LEDs designers insist on putting on anything electronic these days. Now I need to figure out how to stop my refrigerator from sometimes making a whining noise all night...
- Waterluvian 8y agoWho are the clowns who decided the LED should be illuminated when the device is off?! So that I know where to point the remote? Never had that problem before.
- 21 8y agoHow about some reproduction first. I'm sorry, but we live in an age where decades old famous social sciences experiments are proved to be frauds. I have stopped giving any credit to the various "scientific study proves X does/is Y in psychology/social sciences/diet". Every day we have a new "eating red cookies in the morning" makes you "less likely to lie" study.
- aviv 8y agoModern science is largely fiction derived based on the results or propaganda piece sought by the funding party.
- Angostura 8y agoWould you care to stand-up that ludicrous statement?
- aviv 8y agoTake for example most "scientific" research into anything related to health and nutrition. Most of what we think we know about health, proper food consumption and exercise is science fiction and speaks to the ultimate agenda of the funding or otherwise affiliated organizations behind a particular study or institution under which it takes place.
- oculusthrift 8y agoBut you said “modern science”, so I assume you can back up your claims in physics and chemistry as well?
- aviv 8y agoMy take on the fake modern science is based on decades of knowledge and experience in various fields, so yes, I can certainly back it up, but I'm not going to spend my afternoon doing this on an HN thread that ultimately gets me flagged and my content gets removed, as has been the case recently.
- cyberferret 8y agoFor me, it is "new browser tab" effect these days. I will often be reading a website, then think "Oh, I must research this thing they are talking about" or else I will remember some other thing that I have to do online, so I will open a new browser window in the background. But then I will get distracted by something else on the current web page - for even a few seconds - and when I go to the new tab to do what I had planned to do, I sit there in complete blank befuddlement, staring at the empty page and wondering what on earth I was supposed to look up.
- donttrack 8y agoNot only me then.. I thought I was just getting old.
- spython 8y agoEspecially with the "top sites" or "highlights" feature of contemporary browsers, that in essence show different doors, invite into other worlds as soon as you open a new tab. So instead of going where you wanted to go you get disoriented by all the offerings. Can't not link to my blog post Open tabs are cognitive spaces [0] that deals with the browser as the place you externalize your cognition to. [0] https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
- lvncelot 8y ago- "This makes a lot of sense" I say to myself, opening your blog link in a background tab.
- jodrellblank 8y agoI have wanted what you describe, before, at the OS level. Why should groups be limited to just browser tabs? If my task involves some editor windows and some CLI windows and some whatever, why can't I have a virtual desktop grouping it all together? Basically, a VM per overarching task.
- dopkew 8y agoThis is what I do in Firefox: In the current page press Ctrl+k, type the search phrase, press Alt+Enter, to open the search page in a new tab.
- HNricklessness 8y agoWhoever forgets where they are is a moron. Get a Einstein-like skill and ephipany-subject and you'll no longer jerk off to chicken mc doubles. Obviously crack smokers and meek people who fall for this "phenomenon." Perhaps you should just slit your throats. Fucking morons.
- HNricklessness 8y agothe dickless brigade voted me down. Confirms they're in the context of what I wrote above. Upvote as hell.
- rightos 8y agoIt's not forgetting where they are, but forget why they are where they are - I've had this happening occasionally in a variety of forms.
- IncRnd 8y agoHow good is your diet? Does it provide all the needed macro and micro nutrients for your body to work effectively?
- hereturnsHNN 8y agoI'm surprised the cocksucking HN-crowd can't stomach my last posts in this thread. Fucking fuckers.
- owaislone 8y agoThis happens to me quite often and lately, it has started to creep into my computer usage. I often forget why I opened a new browser tab.
- UncleEntity 8y agoI don't even need a doorway, I can easily forget what I was up to between thinking "need keys" and walking over to where the keys live. Kind of annoying TBH...
- hapnin 8y agoI'm old and now believe in the hereafter. I walk into a room and ask myself, "What am I here after?"
- eruci 8y agoI usually forget why I exited
- erikig 8y agoI'm pretty sure I've suffered from this from the moment I was born
- Bizarro 8y agoI'm not sure about this article. For as bad as my memory has always been (and especially bad for being a programmer), I don't have many "why am I in here" moments. It does happen occasionally, but as someone who is thinking about "work-on-the-fly" wherever I am, I think I'm just accustomed to noodling over work (or other background processes) "in the background". Since lots of us are engineer-types, are we more apt at that background processing and then when we hit our primary target (in here to look for keys), we're able to shit into primary focus mode? Now if I'm searching for keys, noodling over some design in the background, and then my wife pops me with a question while I'm lumbering through the house, then I'm in trouble;)
- egypturnash 8y agoEver since I learnt about this, I have made a practice of saying what I'm doing out loud as I leave one room and enter another one to do the thing I want to do. So I have that moment of "I walked through a door and flushed my brain's to-do cache", but it's quickly remedied by the fact that I loaded up a few words describing what I want to do the instant before I stepped through the door into the longer pipeline of brain-to-mouth. It helps me, at least.
- mylons 8y agoalso an interesting effect with psychedelics
- dlwdlw 8y agoDoors trigger our minds loading screens. Memory is loaded from disk. Old context is ejected new is injected. The ego or “i” concept is allotted small attention/memory to carry over stuff. If attention is lost in the middle, the background swap can happen subconscioslu and something you thought you placed nearby can be moved.
- fredley 8y agoAccording to The Meaning of Liff, I have always thought of this as "Woking". http://tmoliff.blogspot.com/2012/06/woking-participial-vb.html?m=1 http://tmoliff.blogspot.com/2012/06/woking-participial-vb.ht...
- barcoder 8y agoIf something is troubling my mind I will walk through a door and voila! My brain has found something else to think about.
- gymshoes 8y agoI think this effect happens of the many distractions in life. Whenever I open a new tab it shows a list of the most popular search trends. I forget what I was supposed to search because fomo. To combat this I have a to do list app where I conveniently list all distractions and forget about them. It's easy too because I know I have that saved for later.
- hangtwenty 8y agoThis thread is a great example of why I love hackernews. It's these curious ones.