Why walking through a doorway makes you forget something

You’re sitting in one room, say your living room. You suddenly, think of a task that needs completion in the kitchen, perhaps as simple as telling your partner something that happened that day.

“Hey babe”, you say.

They look up.

You’re blank.

Depending on how old you are, it could be laughed off as old age.

And yet, science actually tells us that walking through a door does indeed result in forgetting something.

In fact, in 2011, University of Notre Dame Psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky and his colleagues set out to research it.

The team had live and computer-based experiments which tested memory when one left the room through a door or when they completed the task in the same room.

What was found is that when people went through doors, things were filed as done, in part.

So your task in the same room, talking to your partner would sort of feel this way if in the same room. Because there is not much added information needed to carry out the task, such as standing up, moving, absorbing other information, moving through a door and having collate the data in the next room, including partner’s reaction when name is called out, we tend not forget them.

Now in the scenario where you go through the door, the thing you have to tell your partner is part of a bigger story. Maybe it is bad news about your mother coming to visit or how you are going to break it to little Tendai that schools are opening soon. Telling the story is the plan, but the strategy is getting up and going to the next room.

In your mind, you have convinced yourself of the plan but it is an isolated part of much of the above. The anxieties that come with the need to complete the plan because of its importance then have a compounding effect.

Our brains are wired to see boundaries as markers, and doorways more than others. They track our achievement.

So the sequence becomes get up (done), walk (done), walk around the table (done), walk to door (done), open door (done), find partner (done), call out name (done)… then boom.

In the same room you are not executing too many of these.

Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an “event model,” and propose that 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.  That thing in the box?  Oh, that’s from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that.  Other changes may induce a purge as well:  A friend knocks on the door, you finish the task you were working on, or your computer battery runs down and you have to plug in to recharge.

Why would we have a memory system set up to forget things as soon as we finish one thing and move on to another?  Because we can’t keep everything ready-to-hand, and most of the time the system functions beautifully.  It’s the failures of the system—and data from the lab—that give us a completely new idea of how the system works.

With information from Scientific American

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