Research Design Connection: Asking in the Proper Order

Research by Ditta and Storm indicates that when talking to users about their experience with a place or an object, it may be more productive to ask about prior experiences before moving on to review anticipated future ones. They determined that, “People are able to imagine events in the future that have not yet happened, an ability referred to as episodic future thinking…we show that engaging in episodic future thinking can cause related autobiographical memories…and episodic event descriptions…to become less recallable in the future than they would have been otherwise. This finding suggests that episodic future thinking can serve as a memory modifier by changing the extent to which memories from our past can be subsequently retrieved.” In short, thinking about the future can make it more difficult to remember related material from the past.

Annie Ditta and Benjamin Storm. “Thinking About the Future Can Cause Forgetting of the Past.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in press.

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.