The Doorway Effect

Samara Ogra Menon

 We’ve all done it. Walked into a room to get something only to forget why we entered. Gone outside but then forget why you’re there. Interrupt a friend to say something but the thought slips your mind. As much as these events may be embarrassing it’s nice to know that you’re not just getting old, many people experience this. 

Forgetting why you do something is a psychological event called the “Doorway Effect” where a person’s memory deteriorates when their physical setting changes, however it would not have been impacted if they had remained in the original place. This is thought to be due to the change in your physical setting as your brain uses your environment to categorise events. Once you change setting your brain flushes out that information if it is deemed “not necessary” or in some cases, stores it.

Memory is structured around a series of events that happen, or episodes, such as going on a walk or having a conversation, which are broken by sleeping. This is referred to as episodic memory and it refers to the storage of temporary events. Many studies have shown that the location of a person contributes to the storage and organisation of their memories. As memory is stored periodically it is said that a change in environment serves as a break between an episode of your memory. 

Many studies have been conducted to investigate the impact of the “Doorway Effect”. One of the most recent studies conducted at Bond University, Australia researchers replicated the “Doorway Effect” in four different scenarios. Physical and virtual rooms, with and without the participants completing a task (in this case counting backwards) to distract them. The virtual room experiment where the participants were counting backwards showed that the majority of them did not forget to count backwards. However, in the physical room the majority did. The researchers concluded that “we might occasionally forget a single item we had in mind after walking into a new room but, crucially, this usually happens when we have other things on our mind”. A different study on the effect of doorways proposed that the doorway effect may be linked to early self-preservation instincts and behaviours by alerting ourselves towards the new environment therefore moving our attention from an internal perspective to an external perspective. This means that sometimes we may forget what’s on our mind in the moment.

However, all hope is not lost, there are ways if not to eliminate but to reduce the embarrassment of forgetting what you were going to do or say. A psychologist Oliver Baumann said that it may be possible to “immunise” yourself against forgetting things. “If we are single-minded in what we want to do, nothing will stop us remembering. But if we have multiple things going on, forgetfulness becomes noticeable.”