FaktowoWhy do we forget why we walked into a room? It's the 'doorway effect'
You walk into the kitchen and can't remember why. It isn't down to age or absent-mindedness – the brain is simply closing one chapter and opening another.
Almost everyone knows it: you go into another room for something important, cross the threshold and suddenly have no idea why you are there. Psychologists have a name for it – the doorway effect.
The phenomenon was studied by a team led by Gabriel Radvansky at the University of Notre Dame. In a series of experiments, participants carried objects around a virtual and a real building. When they passed through a doorway, they forgot what they were carrying much more often than when they covered the same distance within a single room.
The brain divides the day into chapters
The explanation goes like this: memory does not work like one long tape. The brain organises experiences into 'situation models' – separate packets of information for a specific place and moment. Crossing a threshold signals that a new situation is beginning. The old packet is put aside, and the goal we set out with goes with it.
Newer research from 2021 shows that the effect does not always occur. It appears mainly when memory is already under strain – that is, when we are thinking about several things at once. Sound familiar?
How to help yourself
The simplest method is to repeat your goal in your head just before you go through the door. It also helps to go back to the place where the intention arose – the brain then gets its context back, and the lost thought with it.
- Radvansky G. A., Copeland D. E., “Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space”, Memory & Cognition, 2006
- Radvansky G. A., Krawietz S. A., Tamplin A. K., “Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations”, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2011
- McFadyen J. et al., “Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation”, BMC Psychology, 2021
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