Neat. Do you actually need to move relative to your surroundings? If not, should researchers set up reverse treadmills? If you keep making the right leg movements, does it work from a chair?
As remarked on in the linked blog post, there seems a nontrivial likelihood that the effect is related only to visual processing, not general cognition. While Chatham hedges the visual processing idea a bit, I find it a more persuasive hypothesis than the other options. I can't really give this much weight unless it were demonstrated to have a similar effect on non-visual cognitive tasks.
On the other hand, if this is signicant I may need to take up reverse-pacing.
I'd wait for more study before taking this too seriously. As Chris Chatham also notes...
If stepping backwards is associated with the spreading of spatial attention (as seems reasonable - to make sure you don't fall over!) or simply with less acute vision than stepping to the side or forwards (as also seems reasonable - vision is probably better for objects that approach or stay the same than for those that at least momentarily recede), these effects could be just another demonstration of the well-known sensitivity of the Stroop task to vision and spatial attention.
Neat. Do you actually need to move relative to your surroundings? If not, should researchers set up reverse treadmills? If you keep making the right leg movements, does it work from a chair?
From a recent Psychological Science,
As Chris Chatham notes,
When you suddenly realize that a task is more difficult than you assumed it would be, or when you face a particularly difficult choice in pursuit of rationality, you may find it useful to literally take a step back. For those of us who are particularly interested in making good decisions, this may also serve the purpose of self-signaling, as Yvain and commenters discussed earlier.
Chris's post has a link to a pdf of the paper.