Way cool demosntrations that there are doors to our memory...

Mental Mishaps
Errors in perceiving, remembering, and thinking.
by Ira Hyman
Doorways Cause Forgetting
What did I come here for?
Published on May 25, 2012 by Ira Hyman in Mental Mishaps
Why am I here? I don't mean this in the deep existential sense of why
am I
alive. I am simply wondering why I came into this room. What am I
looking for?
There must be a reason I left that other room and came into this one.
But I
can't remember why I am here.

I'm sure we've all experienced this problem. We've been doing
something in one
room, realized we needed some object from another room, and walked
over there to
retrieve it. Simple. Of course, we arrive in that other room and have
no idea of
why we are there or what object we sent ourselves to retrieve. When
this
happens, I desperately look around for something to inspire my memory,
to remind
me of why I'm there.

Perhaps you've blamed this on your impending cognitive doom, your
eventual
age-related decline. Maybe you've worried that this may be an early
sign of
Alzheimer's Disease.

I have some good news for you. It isn't you and it isn't evidence of
age-related
declines. It's the doorway. Walking through doorways empties your
mind. Doorways
really cause forgetting.

In several clever studies, Gabriel Radvansky and his colleagues have
investigated memory as people move through complex environments. They
first
conducted their research as people navigated through virtual
environments
playing a simple computer game. In the game, people picked up objects
from one
table and carried the objects until they reached another table. At the
new
table, they put down the old object, picked up a new object, and
carried it to
the next table. Every now and then, Radvansky and Copeland (2006)
asked people
about the object they were carrying and the one they had just put
down.

The experimental manipulation is the simple and way cool part of the
research.
To get to the next table, sometimes people had to walk to the far end
of a large
room and other times they moved into a new virtual room, through a
doorway. The
distance traveled was the same. The time it took to make the passage
was the
same. And you couldn't see the other table and object no matter what
(you also
couldn't see the object you were carrying - I guess it was in your
virtual
pocket).

The doorway was the difference. When people walked through a doorway,
they had
more difficulty remembering what object they had just put down and
what object
they were carrying. Walking through the doorways caused forgetting.

In further research, Radvansky, Krawietz, and Tamplin (2011)
demonstrated the
doorway forgetting effect in a real, as opposed to a virtual, walking
environment. They also studied whether returning to the original room
re-instated memory. The answer: Not really. Going back to your bedroom
doesn't
necessarily lead you to suddenly remember why you had journeyed to the
kitchen.

So the good news is that it is perfectly normal to forget why you came
here. The
explanation of the doorway forgetting effect is fun to consider as
well. No, I
don't think it is something about the doorway disrupting brain
function. You do
not need to invest in a special anti-doorway-forgetting hat.

Instead Radvansky and his colleagues have argued that we construct
situational
models of our surrounding environments. These models are generally
vague because
we can sample information from the environment any time we need more
details.
When we enter a new environment, we construct a new situational model,
which
erases the old model. Situational models would include not only vague
information about the environment, but also some information about the
self in
that environment - like what you were carrying and doing. Thus
entering a new
room erases the old information - that is, doorways cause forgetting.

I think this is another example of what Dan Simons and Chris Chabris
call the
illusions of awareness. We believe we are more aware of our
surroundings than we
actually are. We actually keep only a limited model active in our
awareness
because we can always check back with the actual world if we need more
details -
why expend the cognitive resources recreating the world in our heads,
when the
world is constantly available to our perceptual systems. But if the
environment
changes or if we move to a new environment, we may lose information
that we
really only vaguely had in our heads and fail to notice changes in the
environment (see Failing to Notice Haircuts, Missing Buildings, and
Changed
Conversation Partners).

Walking through a doorway replaces one vague situational model with a
new one.
Returning to the original room may not help because now you have
simply created
another new and vague situational understanding.

I regularly find myself walking into a room and wondering why I'm
there. I
return to where I was before and still have no idea why I left in the
first
place. I wander through the halls of my academic building wondering
why I am
here, or there, or wherever it is I find myself. Thankfully, it isn't
just
because I am an absent-minded professor.

Source: Psychology Today
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-mishaps/201205/doorways-cause-forgett\
ing
.