'The Doorway Effect': How Changing Environments Affect Memory & Focus

[Yithian]

Why Does Walking Through Doorways Make Us Forget​

• By Tom Stafford -- 8 March 2016

We’ve all done it. Run upstairs to get your keys, but forget that it is them you’re looking for once you get to the bedroom. Open the fridge door and reach for the middle shelf only to realise that we can't remember why we opened the fridge in the first place. Or wait for a moment to interrupt a friend to find that the burning issue that made us want to interrupt has now vanished from our minds just as we come to speak: “What did I want to say again?” we ask a confused audience, who all think “how should we know?!”​

Although these errors can be embarrassing, they are also common. It’s known as the “Doorway Effect”, and it reveals some important features of how our minds are organised. Understanding this might help us appreciate those temporary moments of forgetfulness as more than just an annoyance (although they will still be annoying).​

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These features of our minds are perhaps best illustrated by a story about a woman who meets three builders on their lunch break. “What are you doing today?” she asks the first. “I’m putting brick after sodding brick on top of another,” sighs the first. “What are you doing today?” she asks the second. “I’m building a wall,” is the simple reply. But the third builder swells with pride when asked, and replies: “I’m building a cathedral!”​

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Maybe you heard that story as encouragement to think of the big picture, but to the psychologist in you the important moral is that any action has to be thought of at multiple levels if you are going to carry it out successfully. The third builder might have the most inspiring view of their day-job, but nobody can build a cathedral without figuring out how to successfully put one brick on top of another like the first builder.​

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As we move through our days our attention shifts between these levels – from our goals and ambitions, to plans and strategies, and to the lowest levels, our concrete actions. When things are going well, often in familiar situations, we keep our attention on what we want and how we do it seems to take care of itself. If you’re a skilled driver then you manage the gears, indicators and wheel automatically, and your attention is probably caught up in the less routine business of navigating the traffic or talking to your passengers. When things are less routine we have to shift our attention to the details of what we’re doing, taking our minds off the bigger picture for a moment. Hence the pause in conversation as the driver gets to a tricky junction, or the engine starts to make a funny sound.​

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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.​

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The Doorway Effect occurs when our attention moves between levels, and it reflects the reliance of our memories – even memories for what we were about to do – on the environment we’re in.​

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Imagine that we’re going upstairs to get our keys and forget that it is the keys we came for as soon as we enter the bedroom. Psychologically, what has happened is that the plan (“Keys!”) has been forgotten even in the middle of implementing a necessary part of the strategy (“Go to bedroom!”). Probably the plan itself is part of a larger plan (“Get ready to leave the house!”), which is part of plans on a wider and wider scale (“Go to work!”, “Keep my job!”, “Be a productive and responsible citizen”, or whatever). Each scale requires attention at some point. Somewhere in navigating this complex hierarchy the need for keys popped into mind, and like a circus performer setting plates spinning on poles, your attention focussed on it long enough to construct a plan, but then moved on to the next plate (this time, either walking to the bedroom, or wondering who left their clothes on the stairs again, or what you’re going to do when you get to work or one of a million other things that it takes to build a life).​

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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.​

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The Doorway Effect occurs because we change both the physical and mental environments, moving to a different room and thinking about different things. That hastily thought up goal, which was probably only one plate among the many we’re trying to spin, gets forgotten when the context changes.​

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It’s a window into how we manage to coordinate complex actions, matching plans with actions in a way that – most of the time – allows us to put the right bricks in the right place to build the cathedral of our lives.​

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Article quoted in full due to regional (non-UK) restrictions:​

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160307-why-does-walking-through-doorways-make-us-forget​

 

[Mythopoeika]

It's another side-effect of living in a virtual reality. Moving through a doorway means moving between environments. All kinds of stuff (scenery, objects, lighting conditions) loads up. If there's a time lag, there's something like the loading screen you get with computer games - and it may be enough to cause a loss of in-game purpose.

 

[Shady]

I don't need a doorway, I forget walking from one side of the kitchen to other, it is because I think of something else and it wipes the other out, cluttery mind

 

[Mythopoeika]

I don't need a doorway, I forget walking from one side of the kitchen to other, it is because I think of something else and it wipes the other out, cluttery mind

You're an absent-minded professor type, like me.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Newly published experimental research contradicts prior explanations for the doorway effect and suggests the effect may not be as profound as originally believed.

What Did I Come in Here For? New Study Explains The Weird 'Doorway Effect'

If you've ever walked into a room, then completely forgotten what you went in there for, you've experienced what's known as the doorway effect: it's almost as if the mind blanks itself as you change location, ready for some fresh experience or input.

In a new study, scientists say the doorway effect (also known as the location updating effect) does appear to be real, but only when our brains are busy. What's more, it may not be as pronounced or straightforward as previous studies might suggest.

Through a series of experiments in virtual reality, a total of 74 volunteers were asked to move through computer-generated 3D rooms, trying to remember certain objects from previous rooms – such as a blue cone or a yellow cross – as they went.

"At first we couldn't find the doorway effect at all so we thought maybe people were too good – they were remembering everything," says psychologist Oliver Baumann, from Bond University in Australia.

"So then we made it more difficult and got them to do backward counting tasks while moving around to load up their working memory."

"Forgetting did now occur, telling us that overloading the participants' memory made them more susceptible to the effect of the doorway. In other words, the doorway effect only occurs if we are cognitively in a vulnerable state." ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/scient...t-could-be-real-but-only-in-overloaded-brains

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details for the recently published study. The full article can be accessed at the link below.


McFadyen, J., Nolan, C., Pinocy, E. et al.
Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation.
BMC Psychol 9, 41 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00536-3

This study presents evidence that is inconsistent with the location updating effect as it has previously been reported. Our findings call into question the generalisability and robustness of this effect to slight paradigm alterations and, indeed, what factors contributed to the effect observed in previous studies.

FULL REPORT: https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-021-00536-3

 

[Austin Popper]

I don't need a doorway, I forget walking from one side of the kitchen to other, it is because I think of something else and it wipes the other out, cluttery mind

I don't even have to move my arse. I get the doorway effect sometimes after opening a new browser tab. Then there is the nodding off in front of the computer. Big Clive's voice will sometimes cause that late at night, even though I find his videos highly entertaining.

Yes, it has been a long winter.

 

[brownmane]

Newly published experimental research contradicts prior explanations for the doorway effect and suggests the effect may not be as profound as originally believed.


FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/scient...t-could-be-real-but-only-in-overloaded-brains

"So then we made it more difficult and got them to do backward counting tasks while moving around to load up their working memory."

"Forgetting did now occur, telling us that overloading the participants' memory made them more susceptible to the effect of the doorway. In other words, the doorway effect only occurs if we are cognitively in a vulnerable state."

Every single day when I'm at work, and not just once. I have literally walked back and forth 5 times into a room where my initial thought occurred, trying to remember what I was about to do. These covid times are very difficult. I am more organized when I am busy and having to plan out how I am going to fit something into a shift at work, than when the days converge into the same thing day in and day out. The things that I forget are minor little things. For example, checking on the laundry. The laundry is in our tub room and I can walk into the room and, because it is the main washroom, will think of some other little chore as I'm walking that way, and totally not remember why I walked to the room. I then usually walk back to where I started, in an attempt to gather my lost thought.

 

[Trevp666]

My father (rest his soul) during his last years saw his cognitive functions reduce significantly towards the end, despite maintaining his sense of humour virtually intact.
His first signs of the vascular dementia which eventually 'did for him' was what we termed 'border amnesia*', in which he would get up out of his chair and walk out to the kitchen and forget what he had gone there for. We just put that down to 'old age' as he was in his late 70s, but he admitted to us one Christmas that he was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on tasks and to remember simple things.
The daft old bugger.

* - I believe this term was used to describe how your perception of your surroundings and the memories that link to those surroundings are reinforced by the surroundings themselves, linked (if you will) by some kind of 'pattern memory' for that area or room, which makes recall of those memories difficult when you're in a different environment, hence crossing a 'border' into a different area brings up a new set of memories, overwriting the memories from the previous place you were in.

Which I'm guessing is the same as the 'doorway' principle outlined in this thread.

 

[Sharon Hill]

This can be a good thing. I immediately feel better when I leave my office building. I start to feel badly again when I exit the elevator onto my office floor the next week. Since I've been working more from home, my attitude is way better. But, some people have a lot more trouble leaving their bad thoughts behind. This is interesting stuff.

 

[Victory]

As @Austin Popper and @brownmane have written, a slight change can disrupt a thought...whether that change is physical or otherwise.

I am slightly Aspergers, so I know that my mind likes to keep a thought and act on it, before dealing with a new one.

It can also be that a thought took all of my brain's computing power to process.

So the slightest interruption to that thought is very hard to deal with.

It affects my work; I will be starting a task about one thing, when a customer mentions something else.

I have to tell them that I am in the middle of a process, and will listen to them in a minute or so when I have completed that process.

 

[Spookdaddy]

A few years back I decided I decided that if I was going to lose my marbles then I might as well get some side benefit out if it, and started taxing myself with ten press-up's every time I found myself standing around wondering what it is I'd moved from one place to another for. At the time I was renovating my place - so, working alone, it was kind of easy to do - but then I started doing it in certain work environments too. (I'm generally hired as a boss - so I can do what I like, yeah?)

The odd thing was that the problem actually seemed to reduce somewhat - and I can't help wondering if the threat of possible punishment somehow rebooted the part of my brain that fell foul of the doorway effect.

...Every single day when I'm at work, and not just once. I have literally walked back and forth 5 times into a room where my initial thought occurred, trying to remember what I was about to do...

Longer ago than I care to remember I started using my fingers as a kind of notepad. In a situation like the one you describe I would assign a task to a finger or thumb - rolling out one digit at a time as I mentally ascribed a job to it. I'll run through the list at least twice, but once you've got the habit it takes seconds to do. For some reason I can remember an element of a list by looking at a finger much more readily than if that list is just in my head; I have no idea if this is a thing - or if it would work for others.

I also use my fingers for things like pin numbers and keypad and padlock codes.

(I think it all started with page numbers. I've always read a lot, but have also always been rubbish with bookmarks - so I used my fingers to note the number.)

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Further discussion about memory aids / mnemonics triggered by this mention of a fingers method has been moved to:

How To Remember: Memory Methods & Mnemonics
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/how-to-remember-memory-methods-mnemonics.65311/