meeting design – Jason Hensel

There are people who can’t talk unless they’re gesturing. But maybe their hand movements are doing more than helping them speak. Perhaps they’re helping them hear.

According to researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, what you hear may depend on what your hands are doing.

“Language is processed mainly in the left hemisphere, and some have suggested that this is because the left hemisphere specializes in analyzing very rapidly changing sounds,” said the study’s senior investigator, Peter E. Turkeltaub, M.D., PhD, a neurologist in the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery.

The researchers used a simple noise and indication test on 24 volunteers for the study. They had to press a button when they heard background sounds, which were quick or slow.

“We asked the subjects to respond to sounds hidden in background noise,” Turkeltaub said. “Each subject was told to use his or her right hand to respond during the first 20 sounds, then the left hand for the next 20 second, then right, then left, and so on.”

People who used their right hand heard the rapidly changing sounds more often than when using their left hand. It was vice versa for the slowly changing sounds.

“Since the left hemisphere controls the right hand and vice versa, these results demonstrate that the two hemispheres specialize in different kinds of sounds—the left hemisphere likes rapidly changing sounds, such as consonants, and the right hemisphere likes slowly changing sounds, such as syllables or intonation,” Turkeltaub said. “These results also demonstrate the interaction between motor systems and perception. It’s really pretty amazing. Imagine you’re waving an American flag while listening to one of the presidential candidates. The speech will actually sound slightly different to you depending on whether the flag is in your left hand or your right hand.”

I think this research is especially interesting for meeting designers and professional speakers. Imagine the ways you could control what your audience hears by simply having attendees hold something. It would be a fun experiment to present two exact sessions (word for word) to different audiences, one that holds something in the left hand and one in the right hand. Then let’s see if session comprehension and scores are different. Anyone willing to try it out?

(Story quotes from Georgetown University. Image via Flickr: Malthe Sigurdsson / Creative Commons)

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Imagine walking through a door and forgetting everything. It’s possible, and a new study in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology explains how. Abstract, you have the floor.

Previous research using virtual environments has revealed a location-updating effect in which there is a decline in memory when people move from one location to another. Here we assess whether this effect reflects the influence of the experienced context, in terms of the degree of immersion of a person in an environment, as suggested by some work in spatial cognition, or by a shift in context. In Experiment 1, the degree of immersion was reduced by using smaller displays. In comparison, in Experiment 2 an actual, rather than a virtual, environment was used, to maximize immersion. Location-updating effects were observed under both of these conditions. 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. Finally, we did a further analysis of the results of this and previous experiments to assess the differential influence of foregrounding and retrieval interference. Overall, these data are interpreted in terms of the event horizon model of event cognition and memory.

Still with me? Basically, what the researchers found is that new memory episodes (event models) form in our brains whenever we enter a new environment. As you move from place to place, you’re stacking memories on top of memories, making them harder to retrieve.

I imagine this knowledge could affect how educators, event planners, or anyone involved in learning and group collaboration structure their operations. If you know that moving people from room to room causes them to forget, wouldn’t it be better to keep everyone in one room all day? If that’s not technically feasible, then what can you do design-wise to mitigate the forgetting?

(Photo via Flickr: Istvan / Creative Commons)

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Jason Hensel

Hearing With Your Hands

The Doors of Forgetting