The Doorway Effect

The Doorway Effect is a known psychological event, where a person's memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another than if they had remained in the same place.^[1] People experience this effect by forgetting what they were going to do, thinking about, or planning upon entering a different room.^[2] This is thought to be due to the change in one's physical environment, which is used to distinguish boundaries between remembered events: memories of events encountered in the present environment are more accessible than those beyond it.^[3]

Memory experience is structured around a series of events or episodes (attending a talk or having a meal with family), in contrast to the continuous stream of behaviour and perception punctuated by periods of sleep.^[4] This mechanism, referred to as episodic memory, refers to the reception and storage of information regarding temporarily dated events, and the temporal-spatial relations between them.^[5] A number of psychological studies have suggested that external context (including, but not limited to, location) plays a significant role in the compartmentalisation of memories.^[6][7][8] Thus, spatial changes to a different location may act as a boundary marker to segment continuous information.  

Existing research on the doorway effect have implored individuals to navigate virtual environments while picking up and setting down objects. These objects vary from a combination of colours and shapes, entering and leaving different rooms while doing so. Participants of these experiments were presented with the names of these objects either (1) across a large room or (2) upon entering a new room (spatial change). They were then required to respond “yes” or “no” with respect to whether the named object matched the one they had carried and eventually set down.

Implications of findings indicating doorways act as event boundaries are seen to contribute towards wider understanding of memory construction and retention. Attention has been placed on the significance of structures of the surrounding environment in how memories are objectively recalled, alongside how it is subjectively recalled: the valence of emotions, specific emotion felt, its intensity and duration.^[9][10]

Theories and studies

In 2006, Gabriel A. Radvansky and David E. Copeland performed the first studies showing information of objects became less accessible upon dissociation from the person and presence of a spatial shift. This was measured by the moving of objects through virtual rooms.^[11]

Radvansky and Copeland presented participants with brief narratives that either associated or dissociated an object from the participant. For example, one could wear a sweatshirt (associated), remove it (dissociated) and go for a run. Explicit measures in the form of memory probes and comprehension ability when answering questions, alongside implicit measures including reading times were assessed. Results showed that information about the object became less available under situations of dissociation, compared to association. Such patterns aligned with existing literature showing the disruption caused by spatial shifts in cognitive processing.^[12][13] Despite this, it remained unclear to what degree the spatial effect observed was caused by the association/dissociation between an object and the participant and/or its spatial shift. Thus, Radvansky and Copeland separated the two components for independent assessment.  

To do this, rooms of varying sizes were introduced, amounting to a virtual removal of walls and doorways so that distance remained the same although different spatial shifts were imposed. Radvansky and Copeland concluded that there continued to be an effect regarding an object's association/dissociation to the participant, and at the same time, also stated that there was: “fairly clear evidence that moving through a doorway from one region to the next made information that would otherwise be highly available less available".^[11]

Real world effects

Separate studies on the presence of a doorway effect elicited incongruences with typical rhythms of life. Some suggest it may be reasonable to expect that humans should instead be rather facile with dealing with movement from one location to another, and its effects on memory recall – especially with objects one was recently carrying. It has been separately proposed that the doorway effect might be attributed to self-preservation behaviours, evoking alertness towards the lurking of predators on the edge of openings when crossing such thresholds. Hence, guiding one's attention from an internal to external perspective.^[3] Implications extend to realms of verbal learning and comprehension, whereby the presence of the effect even on small, short-term memory loads, demonstrates the importance of one's environment on subsequent performance especially for more complex tasks (recalling exam material, interpersonal details, human engagement etc.).

Implications of physical environment with memory extend its role in eliciting revealed behaviours including notions of cognitive empathy gaps, which are underlined by deviations in mentalising processes of one's emotive states.^[14] Examples of how broader contributions to the relations between environment, memory, and behaviour were demonstrated by London-based behavioural consultancy, Cowry Consulting's “Preventing falls with pink walls” project that aimed to reduce unsafe behaviour at construction sites. Changes to the physical environment were made by painting break room walls “Baker Miller pink,” restructuring with plants, softer lighting, and communal tables to differentially segment the space were seen “to reduce anxiety, stress and aggression”.^[15]

Criticisms

Since publication of the original study, some researchers have pointed out that there remains factors part of memory recall that was not considered. Namely, researchers at the University of Queensland “observed no significant effect of doorways on forgetting,” though impairments to signal detection was noted upon entering new rooms (virtual and physical). However, when participants were introduced to a new variable in the form of a secondary counting task, it was reported that such cognitive interference, in tandem with boundary crossing better aligned with previous conclusions suggesting memory decline^[16]

These findings were further supported by research published by Bond University, who concluded the doorway effect “is not as pronounced as previously thought and only occurs when the brain is working hard.” Such conclusions were reached, like studies from the University of Queensland, by introducing secondary tasks participants were asked to engage in. These ranged from performing backward counting tasks while moving around, or purposely overloading their memory to put them in more cognitively vulnerable states. Effects of such human multitasking have led to suggestions by psychologist Dr. Oliver Baumann that it may be possible to “immunise” one from forgetting by becoming more “single-minded in what we want to do.^[17]”

References

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