The Finding Of Lost Things

By Dr Martin Luck
University of Nottingham, UK

In another first for the Null, we bring you the latest research into the field of lostology, the science of retrieving misplaced items.


Introduction
This paper describes ground-breaking research into the phenomenon of loss recovery and reports a distinctly bimodal distribution of find positions within search sequences. Analysis of the distribution of data suggests an approach to the design of search strategies which can be exploited to predict recovery locations, save time and avoid unnecessary stress and anxiety.


Background observations
1. My daughter misplaced her spectacles one morning whilst getting ready for school. She searched her bedroom and a number of other rooms in the house, before realising that she would soon miss her bus and would have to leave without them. After a myopic (and academically unfulfilling) day at school, she returned home and made a further fruitless search of the remoter, unswept corners of the house.

Later in the evening, her sister joined the search, also without success, (although they did recover a long-lost clarinet reed from under the dining room table).

Finally, in the interests of family harmony, her mother started to look and rapidly located the missing spectacles in the linen cupboard, resting demurely on a folded sheet where daughter had evidently left them while fetching a towel earlier in the day. A hasty family conference called to reflect on the experience concluded, unanimously, that they had been found “in the last place anyone would look”, as indeed they had been.

2. On another recent occasion, I put on my jacket to go out and found that my house keys were not in their accustomed place in the left hand pocket. A moment’s reflection reminded me that I had last left the house wearing a different coat and that the keys might well be in the pocket of that garment instead. That is where they turned out to be.

A typical household scene. There could be as many as twelve missing objects in this picture.

These two items of domestic trivia suggested a curiosity about the finding of lost things: they are usually discovered either in the first place one looks or in the last. I could not recall an instance in which an item was recovered from a place intermediate in the search process. Some experimental investigation was required to establish if this was a general phenomenon.

Methods
Data was collected in two ways. For method A, interviews were carried out with as many members of my immediate family as I could encourage to respond seriously. I asked them to recall instances of when they had misplaced things and to try to describe the search process. I asked them to categorise the point in the search at which the item had been relocated as a) the first place investigated, b) the last place investigated, or c) a place intermediate between first and last.

I quickly realised that method A was open to significant sampling bias. The loss of, and subsequent search for, an important item can be a stressful experience, and the longer the search the greater the stress suffered.

Humans tend to remember highly stressful experiences more than less stressful ones and so it followed that my interviewees were more likely to recall long searches rather than shorter ones. Indeed this proved to be the case, with the data showing a pronounced skew to the right (it also became necessary to exclude from the dataset some instances of “infinite search”, where lost items were never ultimately found).

Thus for method B, I moved to direct observation. I went to some considerable lengths to contrive a variety of social, domestic and work situations where I could monitor individuals in the process of searching for essential items.

Typical situations included: 

• following a friend around a supermarket with a list given him by his partner (I knew what was on the list and I also new that his experience of supermarkets is limited);
• watching my wife hunt for the B582 whilst driving north up the A6;
• asking a first year postgraduate student to find a research paper in the library, given only the year of publication, the second author’s middle name and a vague idea of the topic;
• asking my secretary to find the arrival time of a particularly indirect train to Birmingham;
• and a number of other scenarios too dull to report or even remember. (I did consider spending an hour in a local kindergarten watching toddlers hunt for coloured plastic bricks amongst discarded ice-cream cartons, but decided against this when a kindly colleague alerted me to the risk of arrest.)

From these and similar observational scenarios, I again recorded the position of each find as a number within the sequence of examined locations.

Results
Data from methods A and B were combined for analysis and plotted as a frequency diagram (Fig. 1). A total of 37 independent search events are represented in the dataset. I don't think there was any difference between the data collected by the two methods but I couldn’t be bothered to check.




Of the lost items represented by the 37 search events, 7 were found at the first location searched (i.e. immediately), 28 were located “in the last place I looked”, and 2 were found at intermediate positions in the search sequence.

Further investigation of the “intermediates”, by secondary interview with the reporting subjects, indicated that they could be excluded as untrustworthy data. In the first, my mother had embarked on a hunt for her favourite crossword pencil, found it in the fifth location she inspected but then forgotten what it was she was looking for and continued to search until gently reminded of the fact. In the second, carried out in early April, the youngest member of the family was encouraged to look for a foil covered ovoid of chocolate, proceeded to find it under the third settee cushion examined but then continued hunting in the hope (requited, as it turned out) of finding more.

The remaining 35 instances clearly show a ratio of 1:4 in the distribution of “first” to “last” item recovery locations. Remarkably, there were no legitimate instances of item recovery in intermediate search positions.

Discussion and conclusions
The data clearly allows me state: “If you’ve lost something, you’ll find it straightaway or, more likely, at the end of the search.”

The strongly bimodal distribution of the experimental data is intriguing in two principal respects. First, the ratio of first to last positionings, although superficially counterintuitive, becomes quite reasonable on further reflection. Describing something as “lost” implies that one does not know where it is. If one finds such an item immediately, it might well be considered not properly to have been “lost” since, after all, it turned out to be in the first predicted location. Thus, the number of searches recorded as being concluded in the “first” position is almost certainly a gross underestimate.

Second, the absence of intermediate locations in the pattern of successful searches suggests a mis-match between human behaviour and pragmatic wisdom. It is a matter of common experience that we continue to look for lost items in a diverse variety of locations prior to the last whereas, as demonstrated by the current data, experience should have taught us that they will not be found in any of those places.

Discovering the reason why they will never be thus recovered must be left as a challenge for subsequent investigators. Possible lines of enquiry might involve psychology (for example, a subconscious, quasi-masochistic avoidance of too-rapid rediscovery: the vicarious pleasure of the hunt), quantum mechanics (the temporary disappearance of items into a parallel universe for long periods of time), or an evolved opportunism (the evolution by humans of an extended search strategy which maximises the chance of serendipitous discovery of unexpected but ultimately useful items unconnected with the main target of the search). Of course, such researchers may save themselves considerable time and effort by going immediately to the end of their investigations...

To conclude, this research has led to a surprising conclusion, namely that lost things are seldom found until you get to the end of the search. This conclusion is well supported by data and is open to further scientific examination. As a piece of applied research, it suggests a strategy for avoiding wasted time and energy, and not a little frustration, when searching for a lost artefact: if you don’t find it straight away, look immediately in the last place you would look.

*Author’s note: The authors name is real and offers no insight into his own ability to recover lost items.

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