Interesting. Have you ever tried using the spaced repetition learning method by revisiting something in rapid succession, in many different places? I'd be interested to see how that compares to the standard method.
No; I don't have any metrics set up (Mnemosyne doesn't collect that sort of statistic) and by all accounts, the effect is fairly weak - nothing like spaced versus massed.
Recall that the ancient method of loci involves going through doors as part of remember things.
Is this a disadvantage of it compensated for by its advantages? Is this a method it uses to reset the mind and make it easier to recall other things?
My guess would be that we associate memories (especially memories of objects) with specific locations and can remember them better when we're in those locations. One, easily testable, prediction of this theory is that returning to the original room will make the memory more easily accessible.
One, easily testable, prediction of this theory is that returning to the original room will make the memory more easily accessible.
They tested it in a recent paper.pdf).
In Experiment 3, the original encoding context was reinstated by having a person return to the original room in which objects were first encoded. However, inconsistent with an encoding specificity account, memory did not improve by reinstating this context.
Your link goes to the same paper as the original post.
There is an old trick to help you remember something; concentrate on remembering peripheral things, recovering the context, where you were and what you were doing, when you heard or saw what you want to remember. I'm not surprised that it works in reverse, changing contexts interfering with recall, as well.
We investigated the ability of people to retrieve information about objects as they moved through rooms in a virtual space. People were probed with object names that were either associated with the person (i.e., carried) or dissociated from the person (i.e., just set down). Also, people either did or did not shift spatial regions (i.e., go to a new room). Information about objects was less accessible when the objects were dissociated from the person. Furthermore, information about an object was also less available when there was a spatial shift. However, the spatial shift had a larger effect on memory for the currently associated object. These data are interpreted as being more supportive of a situation model explanation, following on work using narratives and film. Simpler memory-based accounts that do not take into account the context in which a person is embedded cannot adequately account for the results.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m6lq80675m22232h/
There's probably some deep implications to this I'm not qualified to plumb. But next time I'm concentrating on something, and need to get up from the computer and walk around a bit, I'm going to try avoiding doorways.