Ever walked into a room and forgotten the reason why you entered? According to Gabriel Radvansky, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame in the U.S, this memory lapse is caused by walking through a doorway.
Study results published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology earlier this year detailed three experiments carried out by Radvansky where university students were assigned tasks in real-life and virtual environments.
Earlier this week Radvansky summarised his findings to the site Life's Little Mysteries (a subsidiary of science news site Live Science) that “entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalised”.
Results from the First Experiment
In the first experiment 24 male and 31 participants used a virtual environment created by the Valve Hammer Program that was used to create environments in the video game Half-Life. Participants moved through 55 virtual rooms using arrow keys on a keyboard, approaching virtual tables and interacting with a combination of shapes and colours.
Their objective was to take a shape from one table and lay it down on the next, either by walking across a large room or by taking the shape through the doorway and into the next virtual room. Around 48 times throughout the experiment participants were asked to identify the shape that they were carrying or the one they had just laid down. The experimenters found that memory was worse when the participants were required to shift location by moving through a doorway than when they were required to walk across a room.
Results from the Second Experiment
The second experiment recruited 32 male and 28 female participants to move through a three-room real life environment. Participants were first required to approach an inverted box and lift it to reveal six coloured shapes and then cover the shapes back up again with the box. They then made their way to a testing station located across the room or through the doorway in the next room, where they were given maths problems to solve for two minutes, serving as a distraction to encourage some forgetting.
A recognition test then followed, where the object names (e.g. red cube, yellow triangle, green circle) would appear on a laptop screen and the participants were required to decide whether those shapes were the ones they were carrying in their boxes. Researchers once again found that participants' memories were better when they were not required to enter another room. They also found that reaction times were slower when they were required to move through a doorway.
Radvansky told Life's Little Mysteries that in experiments one and two, "people were two to three times as likely to forget what they were supposed to do after walking through a doorway".
Results from the Third Experiment
The aim of the last experiment was to determine whether the memory lapse was the result of a change in environment when moving from room to room. Much like the first experiment the third experiment used 88 virtual rooms, which were one of two sizes, and the doorways were at varying locations in each room, so that participants would not form a pattern when navigating the rooms. Each room also had different patterns on the walls so as to emphasize a change in location. Sometimes participants were required to move through several rooms before they were asked about the shapes they had placed down on the table or the one they had just picked up.
Researchers found that returning to previous rooms did not improve participants' memories and when they were required to pass through several doors their error rate increased.
According to Radvansky architects are interested in his research "because they want to design spaces that are more effective. For example, they might need to consider where you need doorways and where you don't." However in an interview with the Vancouver Sun he jokingly gave some impractical advice: "Doorways are bad. Avoid them at all costs."
Bibliography:
- Harris, Misty., 'Memory Lapses Caused by Mental 'Event Boundary': Study', Vancouver Sun, November 8, 2011.
- Krawietz, S.A., Radvansky, G. A., Tamplin, A.K., 'Walking Through Doorways Causes Forgetting: Further Explorations', The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Science, 2011, Vol. 64(8), pp.1632-1645.
- Wolchover, Natalie., 'Forgot Why You Walked in a Room? Doorways are to Blame, Study Finds,' Life's Little Mysteries, 21/11/2011.
Paul Campobasso - I live in Melbourne, Australia and recently graduated from university completing a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Politics and a ...
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