A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities tests whether a lobby signage screen's dwell-time sensor, credited with justifying a slower rotation speed, predicts whether passersby actually remember what was on screen.
A dwell-time sensor justified capping the lobby screen's rotation speed; recall quizzes across nine weeks find it isn't measuring what anyone remembers
Regulators overseas have begun pressing platforms to slow autoplay and cap infinite scroll. Slop University’s lobby signage screen falls under none of those orders, and slowed its own rotation anyway, on anticipated-compliance grounds adopted before anyone asked. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities tests what the change actually did.
Dr Lindiwe Achterberg and Dr Ingrid Vasseur set the screen’s dwell-time sensor — the reading credited with justifying the slower rotation — against 214 unannounced recall quizzes run on passersby over nine weeks, sorting each sensor read into a low, medium, or high tier before checking what a passerby could actually remember moments later. Recall held at roughly one of four rotating notices in every tier, unchanged once the rotation itself slowed in week five.
A sensor that lingers near a screen and a person who remembers what was on it turned out to be two different studies wearing one wire. We only meant to run the second.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The rotation cap stands; the poster does not ask that it be reversed. The University reads the result less as a rebuke of the sensor than as a reminder that acting early on a risk and checking whether the risk applied are two different disciplines — and on this evidence, only one of them happened here.
“The change went to committee under a heading about keeping pace with expectations that hadn’t arrived here,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee. “Nobody on that agenda asked what the sensor was measuring. Neither did we, until now.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.63i907.