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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