Why do doors make you forget

The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. In the first experiment, subjects used a virtual environment and moved from one room to another, selecting an object on a table and exchanging it for an object at a different table.

They did the same thing while simply moving across a room but not crossing through a doorway. Crucially, sometimes the next table was in the same room, and at other times people had to move through an automatic sliding door into another room. To our surprise, we found the doorways had no effect on memory. That is, people very rarely forgot the objects, whether they went through a doorway or not. We decided to repeat the experiment, but this time we had 45 people perform a difficult counting task at the same time, to increase the pressure on the task.

Under these more difficult conditions, this time we confirmed the doorway effect. Specifically, people were more likely to mistake a similar object for the one they were supposed to have memorised.

This finding more closely resembles everyday experience, where we most often forget what we came into a room to do when we are distracted and thinking about something else. There was no change in context, and there was no surprise by how the next room looked. Imagine you are in a shopping centre. Back to story Comment on this project. Tell us what you think Thanks for adding your feedback. All rights reserved.

Why would we have a memory system set up to forget things as soon as we finish one thing and move on to another? Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about?

He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail. Charles B. Louis, where he studies memory, language, and event cognition. Jeffrey M. His laboratory studies perception, memory, brains, movies, and space. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.