You walk into the kitchen, and you forget why you went there in the first place. You try to review the contents of an exam, but when you enter the room, everything evaporates into thin air. What is going wrong? Are we simply too tired or distracted? While those factors can alter our working memory, a group of psychologists at the University of Notre Dame attributes it to the so-called "location effect", also known as the "Doorway Effect". What triggers it? The simple act of crossing thresholds (real and virtual), or going from one room to another.
The human brain has been accused more than once of being... lazy. You know: the law of least effort, energy saving, and a long etcetera. Some examples emerge from optical illusions. Can't we interpret a scene correctly? The brain adds false information to fill in the gaps and that's it. Then there's its habit of forgetting things, but I don't mean something that happened yesterday, but a fact we remembered well twenty seconds ago.
The Doorway Effect and Forgetting
Needless to say, there are specific factors that can alter our memory (let's say, alcohol), however, a group of psychologists at the University of Notre Dame says we can forget things by doing something as simple as crossing a door. Welcome to the "updating effect", or alternatively, the "Doorway Effect". Basically, what happens is that our "working memory", which stores information for processing, is limited. And the best way our brain has to deal with content, according to the "event segmentation theory", is to divide everything into small parts.
This creates "event models" that are used to predict certain actions (for example, if we see someone washing their hands, most likely they will dry them as soon as they finish), but those models need to be constantly updated. That is when "doors, thresholds, and rooms serve as change indicators."
The model updates, but the consequence is that we lose accessibility to prior information. Going back to the previous room to remember doesn't help much either, because that creates a new model that conflicts with the old one. Ironically, under certain conditions, the "Doorway Effect" can help us remember things instead of forgetting them...
