The so-called ‘Doorway Effect’ occurs when we forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary or a lintel.
But are we so fickle?
A team of researchers at Bond University in Queensland have just finished a study into the effect and one of its authors Dr Oliver Baumann explains joined Afternoons to explain their findings.
Photo: Ajale from Pixabay
Baumann says it was first formally investigated by researchers in 2011 in the United States where, in a virtual environment, they had people go through several doorways carrying virtual objects.
They found that they tended to forget the objects they had more often when walking through doorways than when they didn’t.
Baumann says his team decided to look at what happens in the brain to make this effect occur by experimenting both in the virtual and real world.
“The first time around we couldn’t actually find it [the effect]. There was no difference if people walked through the doorway or not in terms of remembering which objects they were carrying.”
They decided to ramp up the difficulty by giving the participants a second task to perform while also having to remember what objects they were carrying.
“We thought, if we do that, we’d find the effect of the doorway, but it was also much smaller than the one previously observed.”
One difference between the studies was that, in the United States the participants walked into rooms which differed from one another, while in Baumann’s the rooms were identical.
“Our interpretation of that is it’s not so much the doorway, but the environmental change. If you put a doorway in your office and walk through ten times, nothing would happen. But if you go through a door way that has a change in context, that seems to be the more common factor.”
They believe the reason for it is that the brain is constructing memory based upon contextual environment changes and that comes at a small cost to short-term memory.
He says there’s no reason to be afraid of a doorway, the contextual changes can change within one room with a change of subject of conversation or changing a TV channel.
The team hopes that their investigation will spur more research into these quirks of memory which can tell us how our mind works.
“It’s not so much the forgetting itself, it tells us how our mind is structured and how our brain tries to be efficient.”
