The “doorway effect”: why do we sometimes not remember why we walked into a room?

The “doorway effect”: why do we sometimes not remember why we walked into a room?

We tell you about the causes of strange memory lapses.

General practitioner, ex-director of the Hillel Foundation in Saratov.

Entering a room, but immediately forgetting why and awkwardly looking around for any sign is a classic of the genre. Fortunately, there’s absolutely no need to worry about getting older or rapidly losing your precious memory.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame discovered an interesting effect back in 2011. Typically, our memory is reset when we pass a doorway from one room to another.

The annoying memory spike is called the “location update effect,” a phenomenon in which some people who enter another room end up forgetting why they came in the first place.

Ten years later, the journal BMC Psychology published a study confirming the reality of the doorway effect. When our brains are in an active state of analyzing information or our thoughts are busy diligently solving a problem, we often zero in when we enter another room.

First, 74 volunteers were tasked with walking through virtual 3D rooms in VR headsets. They had to memorize objects from previous rooms. But at this level of difficulty, the researchers did not notice the doorway effect.

Then the task was made more difficult by suggesting that they search in reverse order to load the short-term memory of the experiment participants.

Since the virtual spaces were almost identical, the experiment was not as revealing as earlier experiments, because the movements were not accompanied by a change of environment, which triggers the updating of short-term memory.

However, it was possible to confirm that the brain separates information from different environments and stores it in a separate information network if it relates to a different context. This separation of information between “compartments” helps us remember more than if memory were a single workspace.

But by moving between different streams, we risk losing some of the information we remembered just seconds ago. We are limited in the amount of things our brains can hold our attention on, so we can’t remember too much information at once.

So the next time you walk into a room, try to focus on your goal, this will help avoid the doorway effect.