The Doorway Effect and Me

Scientific American on the “common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you’ve forgotten what you went there to do,” usually because we weren’t paying enough attention, too much time has passed, or it wasn’t important enough. Another factor, “walking through doorways causes forgetting.” Scientists have shown, at least in the context of a simplified video game version of real life, that people forgot which object they had picked up more often “when they’d walked through a doorway into a new room than when they'd walked the same distance within the same room.”

This may be related to the fact that “memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning.” However, walking back to the room in the video game where the person picked up the object should have boosted recall, but it didn’t. Instead, the doorway effect seems “optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff.” In other words, the purging process preserves limited memory space for more important things, like the sabretooth tiger that may be hiding outside the cave.

My doorway experiences are mixed. When I return from the kitchen without accomplishing what I went there to do, the usual reason seems to be that I immediately saw other things I wanted to do and got distracted doing them. I don’t often step into the room and wonder why I did so. On the other hand, sometimes I get the same forgetting experience without the doorway; I turn towards a different part of the room (the refrigerator, the pantry) and have to ask myself what I was planning to do there.

The fact that these kinds of forgetting seem to increase with age is, I think, Nature’s provision that we get more exercise retracing our steps to accomplish these forgotten objectives.