Remembering about documents: memory for appearance, format, and location

If we remember the visual appearance of documents, and other attributes such as location, then a number of new information management strategies become possible candidates for application in the design of filing systems. This paper describes a number of experiments aimed at investigating aspects of memory for documents in office settings. There is no evidence, as has previously been suggested, that automatic encoding for appearance or location of documents occurs at significant levels. The results of these experiments are more consistent with the view that visual and spatial attributes of documents are remembered in proportion to the attention paid to them when the documents are handled. The experiments also illustrate the sensitivity of this principle to the context in which subjects use documents. It is apparent that office tasks vary considerably in the extent to which subjects must pay attention to the visual and locational attributes of the documents handled. The consequences for the design of filing systems is discussed in terms of what methods for storage and retrieval can usefully be built into the design of systems.