January 21, 2016
This week we’ve been at the Promotional Products Expo in Coventry. The point of promotional products is to improve brand awareness, which they do by making your brand more memorable to recipients. [Incidentally, studies have shown that when provided with free promotional gifts, an impressive 94% of consumers remember the name of the brand that gave it to them. We’d remind you to use a good quality product of course, to ensure it’s a good memory of your brand].
So whilst we were mulling over how branded corporate gifts can aid recall of your brand name, we thought we’d look into facts about human memory for this weeks Friday Fact. Well our research threw up something that we found to be fascinating: walking through doorways causes memory lapses! No, we’re not making this up to explain a lot of what goes on in our offices, it has been proven by researchers from the University of Notre Dame.
In the research, participants were asked to carry out tasks either in a virtual world or the real world and in both cases they forgot more after they walked through a doorway, even if going through the doors led them back to the original room they had started in.
It doesn’t matter whether you are are going in or out of a room, the act of walking through the doorway amounts to an “event boundary,” separating what happens in one room from what happens in another and therefore making it harder to remember what you decided or did in the other room, as your mind has filed it away in a separate part of your mind.
So the next time you go into a room and end up standing there, looking round and wondering what an earth you are meant to be doing, don’t feel too bad, it’s the doorways fault! Watch out for more interesting Friday Facts on our site.
