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The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.” In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You're sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you've forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused—until you look down and see the cup.
So there's the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.”
Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin seated participants in front of a computer screen running a video game in which they could move around using the arrow keys. In the game, they would walk up to a table with a colored geometric solid sitting on it. Their task was to pick up the object and take it to another table, where they would put the object down and pick up a new one. Whichever object they were currently carrying was invisible to them, as if it were in a virtual backpack.
Sometimes, to get to the next object the participant simply walked across the room. Other times, they had to walk the same distance, but through a door into a new room. From time to time, the researchers gave them a pop quiz, asking which object was currently in their backpack. The quiz was timed so that when they walked through a doorway, they were tested right afterwards. As the title said, walking through doorways caused forgetting: Their responses were both slower and less accurate when they'd walked through a doorway into a new room than when they'd walked the same distance within the same room.
This “doorway effect” appears to be quite general. It doesn't seem to matter, for instance, whether the virtual environments are displayed on a 66” flat screen or a 17” CRT. In one study, Radvansky and his colleagues tested the doorway effect in real rooms in their lab. Participants traversed a real-world environment, carrying physical objects and setting them down on actual tables. The objects were carried in shoeboxes to keep participants from peeking during the quizzes, but otherwise the procedure was more or less the same as in virtual reality. Sure enough, the doorway effect revealed itself: Memory was worse after passing through a doorway than after walking the same distance within a single room.
Is it walking through the doorway that causes the forgetting, or is it that remembering is easier in the room in which you originally took in the information? Psychologists have known for a while that memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning; this is an example of what is called the encoding specificity principle. But the third experiment of the Notre Dame study shows that it's not just the mismatching context driving the doorway effect. In this experiment (run in VR), participants sometimes picked up an object, walked through a door, and then walked through a second door that brought them either to a new room or back to the first room. If matching the context is what counts, then walking back to the old room should boost recall. It did not.
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35 Comments
Add CommentPaul Valery also said: "The future is not what is used to be..." and it isn't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was going to say something else, but I forgot...
If walking through doorways purges short-term memory, wouldn't walking through a series of doorways (perhaps with additional memory tasks in each room) have an accumulating effect?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, I once took my son to the airport for a flight. At the departure terminal we ran into this lady that insisted that we knew each other - it took an embarrassingly long time to remember she was my sister-in-law, even after she'd told me her first name! I chalked this up to a contextual error...
Is it a doorway, or is it passing a distraction? Have the male subjects walk by an attractive woman or some other distraction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis seems like it would be a survival advantage. The new environment (new room) is unknown and therefore dangerous. The mind's full attention should be focused on everything that is new rather than some recent short term trivia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs the scientific community unaware of the human aura? What do you suppose the aura does. It's not just a radiation; it's a field. The field holds electrical "bodies" and is disrupted by things like square doorways, electrical fields and high speeds. Instantly regenerated but with differences. Connection to some senses and whiff-like memories (ones not committed to the folds of the brain tissue)are easily disrupted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis should be a known aspect when making physco-neuro queries. Without awareness as to the whole human structure (including electrical aspects) the picture is only half there.
"The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCommon?
Annoying?
The author perhaps should consider therapy, the normal kind for paranoid delusions.
Life is normal, humans are flawed, get over it.
Annoying?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe author perhaps should consider therapy, the normal kind for paranoid delusions.
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What should we think of posters that recommend therapy for other people on the flimsiest of cherry-picked 'evidence'?
Whew! - and I thought I was suffering from incipient dimentia. I can tell my self-described scatter-brained spouse the same thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPabloson...as a paleontologist I thought the same. This is a behavior linked to prioritizing what our consciousness needs to focus on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst...self preservation. This woud be the same as a deer stepping out into a clearing, a bird flying to another tree, etc.
There is a nother comment above about a masle walking by an attractive female...true again.. This would come after self preservation. Things will distract from the current task at hand when they are higher up on the priority list.
@pabloson
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like the thinking here, seems possible.
My dad and I were just discussing how human vision might work, considering focus and peripheral vision. He has done work in photography and CGI and thinks that peripheral vision might be like texture mapping. If we see focus on an object first, when we focus on something else, our brain makes a texture map of the object and "paints" it on the object in our periphery. Explaining why we think we see a bug crawling toward us in our periphery, and when we focus on it, it was just a ball of lint. Maybe making a new texture map of a new room takes brain attention away from the object we were holding...
edit
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the lint/bug analogy, I was insinuating that we had never focused on the lint, so our brain painted the image of a bug (taken from our memory of a bug of similar size and color), and simply painted it on the lint. The bug is more dangerous, evolutionarily speaking, so it makes sense that our brain would use that image, rather than another ball of lint from our memory banks.
This, no doubt, is why I found living in a loft so marvelously efficient.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe if they opened the door first they wouldn't be so likely to forget? I tend to forget things as I grow older and it does not seem to be related to doorways. Unless you count birthdays as doorways that is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe human brain is a remarkably evolved structure, acknowledged by many neuroscientists as the most complex known structure in the Universe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDue to its evolutionary history, the brain shows compromises in its structures. For example, the decision making region has a limited capacity, and experiments show that deciding whether to have coffee with biscuits instead of cereal for breakfast, can affect our subsequent decisions later in the day, even those decisions that have nothing to do with culinary choices.
Memories are not stored like a video recording, but salient features filtered by our individual schemas, are stored in different regions, which explains why when recalling common shared events, one person will report what happened differently from someone else.
Short term memory is stored in the hypothalamus before it is distributed to the different regions, and emotional memories are processed in the amygdala.
The "doorway effect" may be related to another effect from my personal experience when I am in the one room and then another though occurs to me, replacing the initial thought. Or I am working on an idea on my word processor and I get a 'phone call, then after I complete the call, I focus back on the word processor and I cannot recall where I was heading with my thoughts, or I recall the gist but not the words I had decided on using.
The other aspect of human short term memory is that on average we can remember seven separate items, some people manage five and others nine items. There are some folks with an eidetic memory.
The ease with which short term memory forgets, is why young children need to spend tedious hours in memorizing multiplication tables. Repetition is the mechanism by which short term memory is transferred to the cerebral cortex.
Forgetting can seem annoying, however it is useful to allow our brains to forget because of the one known case of a Russian journalist Mr Shereshevsky, who had a perfect memory and could remember anything he'd seen or heard. See:
http://www.wellsphere.com/mental-health-article/the-unforgettable-shereshevsky/412683
His rare ability left him very sensitive to environmental factors.
Some savants can recall events, or play music perfectly after hearing it once:
http://www.mindpowernews.com/Savants.htm
I can't even remember how much I've forgotten.....;>)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsidering if this could be linked to why older people with dementia lighten up and become activated when visitting a home furnished in the 1950s style? Are they coming back "in" through this doorway?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOMG... this is so familiar. The way they put it, our short term memory can be summed up as an application memory space managed by a third party interpreter. I expect that the neuroscience people would be pointing to the frontal cortex as deciding that future events in the short term are more important than the short term events prior to walking through the door, thus: flush memory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn programming it is very similar. Take Visual Studio .Net for example. The third party (runtime environment) evaluates events as they happen and sets up 'garbage collection' events which take unneccessary memory and 'dump' it. This frees memory for further tasks and prevents memory overload, slowdowns, and lockups from poor programming. Effectively it allows many different applications with different languages and proceedures to coexist in the same memory space without bogging down the computer they are run on.
Sound like the concept came straight from neuroscience? So, which came first the code or the science? I say, 'egg'.
"self-preservation?" give me a freaking break. There is no "heightened awareness" when entering a new room. People walk absent-mindedly into different rooms all the time. And apparently the study holds true when walking from one familiar room into another.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"bugs are more dangerous than lint..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, bugs are more COMMON than patches of lint. So when the brain sees a partial pattern, it fills in the blank with the most likely scenario.
Perhaps our educational system should consider keeping students in the same room and change the subjects, rather than have students change rooms for each different subject. Maybe that's why we forget what we learned each time we exit the class.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis helps explain why I find myself wondering about the hereafter. I go into the kitchen to fetch something and then find myself wondering, "What did I come in here after?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe state-dependent memory phenomonon isn't just about the physical context in which the data was acquired, but is also about the mental context in which it is embedded; we know that people who are depressed remember unpleasant events from their past better than pleasant ones, for example. The two are connected, of course, as two parts of what we are conscious of, and when one changes, so does the other.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat has been said above about a new environment triggering an alerting mechanism makes sense within that model, but I am also wondering if the forgetting isn't partly caused by activation of different areas of the brain subsequent to moving away from the immediate environment, as in recent experiments on how trying to talk on the phone and drive cause both tasks to degrade.
This phenomenon is not new. It is a special case
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisof a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect named after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna. The waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served. When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.
Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on. She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads (Zeigarnik, 1927). Except some of the time they were interrupted half way through the task. Afterwards she asked them which activities they remembered doing. People were about twice as likely to remember the tasks during which they'd been interrupted than those they completed.
In the original description subjects were waiters going
from table to table taking orders and delevering food, while in the most recent experiment game players were going from table to table taking objects to other tables.
The researchers here assume the explanation centers on "walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe brain doesn't "purge" like a washing machine or a computer ("Never leave the room with your purge valve open!"). I suspect that the researchers are misinterpreting their results.
Instead, the effect probably tells us something about how visual information is used and its importance to the brain. One effect is that the brain might rely on physical context as it induces (what enters our consciousness as) our perception of objects, doing something with them and so on. When competition from other objects/contexts emerges, we might forget our original intentions.
This happens all the time to me. Not necessarily walking through a door way. I'm a carpenter and going for a tool or materials inside or outside, doorway or not, can lead to a complete blank. Going back to the place where I was when I thought of the need always brings the thought back to mind. I don't know why the memory disappears but it is context that brings it back.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGoing through the bathroom door or through the kitchen door for a beer during a football game commercial break caused no forgetting. Coming back out resulted in forgetting that I thought of and intended to write that observation here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn alternative explanation for the doorway amnesia effect, at least for men: entering something protected by a door is in some way , at least in a symbolic way, a penetration, I mean a sexual one, and some people have amnesia after a climax. It can be just a Pavlov-dog like conditioned response. Or not ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrikes me like one writer said earlier this is probably distraction. You pass thru doors and enter new room or have to establish it is the same room and your brain is establishing this through image comparison, if you use image to remember the item then your reaction will be slower. Did a little self experiment the other day , when driving I can sing in my mind but it is very hard to recall in detail a favourite painting...hard to use relatively same circuits...obvious I m sure but passed the time in the car.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrikes me like one writer said earlier this is probably distraction. You pass thru doors and enter new room or have to establish it is the same room and your brain is establishing this through image comparison, if you use image to remember the item then your reaction will be slower. Did a little self experiment the other day , when driving I can sing in my mind but it is very hard to recall in detail a favourite painting...hard to use relatively same circuits...obvious I m sure but passed the time in the car.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've used a similar - perhaps identical - technique to break "mental-blocks" while composing music.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI noted that when I'd walk out of my studio the idea I was looking for would somehow just come to me! I chalked it up to self-distraction and actually began using it purposely to great success but now could test if it's the doorway-effect.
I was going through at least one doorway to do other things when I first noticed this so...?
The "human aura" is simply a bioelectric field and is erroneously pointed at for all kinds of things such as memory, precognition and even the soul. It has little if any relation to those at all. It is simply the accumulation of electrical charge generated by normal biological function. If your aura is disrupted enough by a door to wipe your short term memory then you probably have a serious mental illness and need treatment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh wow, and I thought I only had Alzheimer's.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it is totally safe to say that the scientific community is absolutely unaware of the human aura. This may be because auras tend to suffer from catastrophic existential failure...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOkay, so I go through the doorway from the living room into the kitchen. By the time I pass through the doorway, I forgot what I wanted from the kitchen. I look around the kitchen totally puzzled. So I go back through my doorway into my living room; then I suddenly remember what I wanted from the kitchen. Did the doorway restore my memory? Will I forget again, if I walk through the doorway into the kitchen? Can I use the doorway to erase bad memories that I want to forget?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf I walk through the doorway into the bedroom and fall asleep until morning, will I never remember anything that happened the day before? If I live in a one-room apartment, will I never forget anything again?
Suppose the doorway was a triangle, would I still forget why I walked through the doorway?
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