Have you ever rushed across your house to get something from another room, but by the time you got there you completely forgot why you were there? This might seem like a trivial question for architects, but it might have more to do with architecture than you might think. Your memory appears to be affected by how many doorways and rooms you go through. This sounds absurd, but a recent study published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology has been able to measure this effect at several different levels of environmental immersion. The study comes out of Norte Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky’s lab. Much of Professor Radvansky’s work explores how spatial organization can influence the mental narratives we construct to learn, retain and apply information. Radvansky believes, “many architects already intuitively grasp many of the concepts work examines, but research could further improve their understanding of how spatial design affects a building’s users.”
The location-updating effect: 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.
Perhaps the most maddening aspect regarding this effect is that it holds true at different levels of immersion. The effect has now been tested at three different scales: a 66” diagonal display screen simulation, a 17” diagonal monitors simulation, and a full-scale immersion in a real environment. This finding suggests that the effect arises more from a conceptual framework than a perceptual one.
