The researchers found that the doorway effect started occurring. Thus, under working memory load, memory was more susceptible to interference after moving through doorways. So the bottom line? You're not growing old, you're not losing your memory, and your brain-fade moment isn't as unique as you think. The way our attention moves up and down the hierarchy of action is what allows us to carry out complex behaviours, stitching together a coherent plan over multiple moments, in multiple places or requiring multiple actions.
Our brain organises our goals into a hierarchy of actions - but even the simple act of walking through a door may cause us to lose track of our plans Credit: Getty Images. Each scale requires attention at some point. And sometimes spinning plates fall. Our memories, even for our goals, are embedded in webs of associations. That can be the physical environment in which we form them, which is why revisiting our childhood home can bring back a flood of previously forgotten memories, or it can be the mental environment — the set of things we were just thinking about when that thing popped into mind.
The Doorway Effect occurs because we change both the physical and mental environments , moving to a different room and thinking about different things. If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these columns please get in touch with tomstafford on Twitter, or ideas idiolect.
As soon as you sit down, you remember you wanted to make popcorn. You go back into the kitchen, this time with a newfound determination. Although these lapses in memory might seem entirely random, some researchers have identified the culprit as the actual doorways. Many studies have investigated how memory might be affected by passing through doorways.
Read more: Curious Kids: why do I sometimes forget what I was just going to say? When we move from one room to another, the doorway represents the boundary between one context such as the living room and another the kitchen. We use boundaries to help segment our experience into separate events, so we can more easily remember them later. Hence, when a new event begins, we essentially flush out the information from the previous event because it might not be relevant anymore. In other words, our desire for popcorn is connected with the event in the living room the TV show and that connection is disrupted once we arrive in the kitchen.
If the doorway effect is so powerful, why are these memory lapses at home actually quite rare? We decided to look into this effect more closely. We had 29 people wear a virtual reality headset and move through different rooms in a 3D virtual environment see image below.
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