“Door Effect”. Why do we lose the thread when we enter another division

A cognitive neuroscientist explains a strange quirk of memory: we often lose track the moment we enter another room. The phenomenon occurs in three parts, and suggests that there is something almost “magical” about the impact of doors on the brain.

Don’t be alarmed: you are far from the only person to have gone through this somewhat unsettling experience: in fact, psychologists at the University of Notre Dame, in the state of Indiana, have been researching what has become known as “Door Effect”, or “Location Update Effect”.

In one of the studies, researchers used a virtual reality system to show that volunteers’ memory of objects in a room decreased as soon as they passed through a door to enter another division, explains the cognitive neuroscientist Christian Jarrett that .

The researchers proposed a three-part explanation: our memories are organized into episodes; it becomes more difficult to retrieve information from previous episodes; and when we walk through a door, this gesture creates a new episode — or an “event boundary”which makes it more complicated to remember our intention, recorded in the previous memory episode.

Until now, there seemed to be something almost “magical” in the impact of the doors over the brain.

However, in a published in 2021 in BMC Psychologya team from the University of Queensland painted a more concrete picture of the phenomenon.

The study authors found that walking through doors that connected mostly identical rooms did not affect memory – perhaps because there was not enough context change to create a meaningful event boundary.

Only when researchers distracted study participants with a concurrent secondary task that doors between identical rooms affected memory.

According to the study authors, this result is in line with our everyday experienceinsofar as it is mainly when we are distracted, with your mind on other thingsthat we tend to get to a room and forget what we were doing there.

The results also suggest that the door effect is more likely to occur when there is a significant change of contextfor example, if we leave from the living room to the garden.

The new results also point to a potential solution: try to stay focused on your goal when you walk through a door with a specific purpose. Naturally, to do this, you first have to remember that you are going to forget what was in your thoughts…