Can Websites Make Us Forgetful?

by Admin


19 Dec
 None    Internet Related


by Gord Hotchkiss


by Gord Hotchkiss

Ever open the door to the fridge and then for­get what you were look­ing for?

Or ever head to your bed­room and then, upon enter­ing it, for­get why you went there in the first place?

Me too. And it turns out we’re not alone. New research from the Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame’s Gabriel Rad­van­sky indi­cates this sud­den “thresh­old” amne­sia is actu­ally pretty com­mon. Walk­ing from one room to another trig­gers an “event bound­ary” in the mind, which seems to act as a cue for the brain to file away short-term mem­o­ries and move on to the next task at hand. If your tasks causes you to cross one of these event bound­aries and you don’t keep your work­ing mem­ory actively engaged through delib­er­ate focus­ing of atten­tion, it could be dif­fi­cult to remem­ber what it was that moti­vated you in the first place.

Ever since I’ve read the orig­i­nal arti­cle, I’ve won­dered if the same thing applies to nav­i­gat­ing web sites. If we click a link to move from one page to another, I am pretty sure the brain could well send out a “flush” sig­nal that clears the slate of work­ing mem­ory.  I think we cross these event bound­aries all the time online.

Let’s unpack this idea a bit, because if my sus­pi­cions prove to be cor­rect, it opens up some very per­ti­nent points when we think of online expe­ri­ences.  Work­ing mem­ory is directed by active atten­tion. It is held in place by a top down direc­tive from the brain. So, as long as we’re focused on mem­o­riz­ing a dis­crete bit of infor­ma­tion (for exam­ple, a phone num­ber) we’ll be able to keep it in our work­ing mem­ory. But when we shift our atten­tion to some­thing else, the work­ing mem­ory slate is wiped clean. The spot­light of atten­tion deter­mines what is retained in work­ing mem­ory and what is discarded.

Radvansky’s research indi­cates that mov­ing from one room to another may act as a sub­con­scious envi­ron­men­tal cue that the things retained in work­ing mem­ory (i.e. our intent for going to the new room in the first place) can be flushed if we’re not con­sciously focus­ing our atten­tion on it. It’s a sort of men­tal “palate cleans­ing” to ready the brain for new chal­lenges. Rad­van­sky dis­cov­ered that it wasn’t dis­tance or time that caused things to be for­got­ten. It was pass­ing through a door­way. Oth­ers could travel exactly the same dis­tance but remain in the same room and not for­get what their orig­i­nal inten­tion was. But as soon as a door­way was intro­duced, the rate of for­get­ting increased significantly.

Inter­est­ingly, one of the vari­a­tions of Radvansky’s research used vir­tual envi­ron­ments and the results were the same. So, if a vir­tual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a door­way trig­gered a bound­ary, would mov­ing from one page of a web­site to another?

I think there are some dis­tinc­tions here to keep in mind. If you go to a page with intent and you’re fol­low­ing nav­i­ga­tional links to get closer to that intent, it’s prob­a­bly pretty safe to assume that there is some “top down” focus on that intent. As long as you keep fol­low­ing the “intent” path, you should be able to keep it in focus as you move from page to page. But what if you get dis­tracted by a link on a page and fol­low that? In that case, your atten­tion has switched and mov­ing to another page may trig­ger the same “event bound­ary” dump of work­ing mem­ory. In that case, you may have to retrace your steps to pick up the orig­i­nal thread of intent.

I just fin­ished bench­mark­ing the user expe­ri­ence across sev­eral dif­fer­ent sites for a client and found that con­sis­tent nav­i­ga­tion is pretty rare in many sites, espe­cially B2B ones.  If you did hap­pen to for­get your orig­i­nal intent as you nav­i­gated a few clicks deep in a web­site, back­track­ing could prove to be a challenge.

I also sus­pect that’s why a con­sis­tent look and feel as you move from page to page could be impor­tant. It may serve to lessen the “event bound­ary” effect, because there are sim­i­lar­i­ties in the environment.

In any case, Dr. Radvansky’s research opens the door (couldn’t resist) to some very inter­est­ing spec­u­la­tions. I do know that in the 10 B2B web­sites I vis­ited dur­ing the bench­mark­ing exer­cise, the expe­ri­ence ranged from mildly frus­trat­ing to excru­ci­at­ingly painful.

In the worst of these cases, a lit­tle amne­sia might actu­ally be a blessing.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider December 15, 2011


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.



News Categories

Ads

Ads

Subscribe

RSS Atom