You were sitting in the living room, all comfy, watching Netflix. All of a sudden, you felt the urge to take coffee. Pausing the show, you walked to the other room to fetch yourself a cup of coffee. But, when you reached the other room, you just can’t remember why you were there. Has this ever happened to you? If yes, don’t worry- you’re not going mad, it is not the onset of dementia, and you certainly don’t have a memory problem.
A possible explanation for this very common phenomenon is the doorway effect. As the name suggests, you need a doorway for this to take effect. One of the very first empirical experiments on this was conducted by a group of psychologists at Notre-dame. They tested a group of undergrads in a very clever procedure. They asked the subjects to place six different shapes with different colours in a shoebox, like a green cube, yellow sphere, etc. Then they were made to either walk to the other side of a big room or to pass through a door to the other room and then they were quizzed on the contents on the box. Most people were able to memorize them accurately. However, the performance of subjects send to the other room was consistently low. They found that something as simple as passing through a doorway can make you forget things and thus the name doorway effect. If you think the name isn’t ‘sciency’ enough, it is also called the location updating effect.
Since this experiment, there have been several attempts at explaining this phenomenon. And one of the best possible explanation seems to be the way our brain process things. You might have heard of working memory, our neural representation of things happening around us. Working memory can only hold a limited number of items for a limited amount of time. So in order to process information more effectively, our brain breaks it into chunks. This view is known as the Event segmentation theory, according to which our brains create event models to predict what might come next at any given moment. For example, if you see a person blowing on a cup of coffee, you would automatically expect that person to take a sip next. However, after the person takes a sip, the event in which the person blew on the coffee is irrelevant or at least relatively irrelevant. These cut-off points of relevance are called event boundaries.
Judging by the same approach, psychologists think people might have a hard time remembering things because they create different event models for each room, in which the doorways act as event boundaries. So, when your brain tries to retrieve information about a prior event model, it competes and interferes with the current model.
However, this doorway effect is in many ways, quite useful for us. Because most often passing through a doorway does mean starting a new event. The same Notre-dame psychologists came up with another similar experiment. This time, they challenged students to remember a list of words that were read aloud, half in one spot and the other half in a different room or the same distance away within the same room. The subjects remembered more words when they were made to pass through a doorway because by considering the two halves as different events, they could organize the words better. Here, the doorway effect was beneficial.
Doorway effect is but a very small yet interesting phenomenon associated with our brain. And it is these minute details that make the lump of flesh on our head the best creation in the whole wide universe.
