物忘れ
何しに来たのと 我に問い
立ち上がって、部屋にはいると、なんで来たんだっけ、と思うことはある。ボケのせいかと思ったらそうでもないらしい。
WEDNESDAY, JAN 22, 2014 09:50 PM +0900
Why walking through a doorway makes you forget
New scientific research helps offer an explanation for one of life's most frustrating day-to-day to phenomena
CHARLES B. BRENNER, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Is it walking through the doorway that causes the forgetting, or is it that remembering is easier in the room in which you originally took in the information? Psychologists have known for a while that memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning; this is an example of what is called the encoding specificity principle. But the third experiment of the Notre Dame study shows that it’s not just the mismatching context driving the doorway effect. In this experiment (run in VR), participants sometimes picked up an object, walked through a door, and then walked through a second door that brought them either to a new room or back to the first room. If matching the context is what counts, then walking back to the old room should boost recall. It did not.
The doorway effect suggests that there’s more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried. Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff. Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an “event model,” and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues.
Other changes may induce a purge as well: A friend knocks on the door, you finish the task you were working on, or your computer battery runs down and you have to plug in to recharge.
Why would we have a memory system set up to forget things as soon as we finish one thing and move on to another? Because we can’t keep everything ready-to-hand, and most of the time the system functions beautifully. It’s the failures of the system―and data from the lab―that give us a completely new idea of how the system works.
人間は、状況の変化に即応して生活していく動物であって、人間の記憶というのは、すべてのことをいつでも役立てるように記憶しておくわけにもいかず、状況に変化があると、不要なものは削除するようにできており、部屋が変わったり、友達がドアをノックしたり、ある仕事がおわったりと、何らかの節目があると、それまでの記憶を消去してしまうもので、だから、何かしようと違う部屋に入って、あれ、何しにきたんだっけな、ということがあるのだ、と。
