Doorway effect

The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another. People tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary and often forget what they were thinking about or planning on doing upon entering a different room. Research suggests that this phenomenon occurs both at literal boundaries (e.g., moving from one room to another via a door) and metaphorical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer).
Memory is organized around specific events or episodes, such as attending a lecture or having a family meal, rather than being a continuous stream interrupted by sleep. This organization is called episodic memory, which involves receiving and storing information about events that are temporarily dated, along with their time and place relationships.
Numerous psychological studies have indicated that the external context, including the location where events occur, plays a significant role in how memories are separated. This context helps establish distinctions between different remembered events. Memories of events that happen in the environment we're currently in are easier to access compared to those from different places. As a result, when we experience spatial changes and move to a different location, it can act as a boundary marker that separates and categorizes our continuous flow of memories into distinct segments.
Research on the doorway effect involves having people navigate virtual environments while picking up and putting down various objects. During these experiments, participants were given the names of these objects either (1) as they moved across a large room or (2) when they entered a new room (a spatial change). They then had to indicate whether the named object matched the one they had carried and eventually placed down. Findings indicating doorways act as event boundaries contribute towards wider understanding of memory construction and retention. They indicate 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.
In a 2021 study, researchers at Bond University tried to replicate the doorway effect in four experiments: in both physical rooms and virtual rooms, and both with and without the participants doing a “distractor task” (counting backwards). In one experiment—in virtual rooms, and with a distractor task—doorways caused a statistically significant increase in false positives (i.e., false memories), but not false negatives (i.e., forgetting). In the other three experiments, doorways had no effect. The researchers suggested that this was consistent with real life, in which "we might occasionally forget a single item we had in mind after walking into a new room but, crucially, this usually happens when we have other things on our mind . . . ."
One of the study authors, psychologist Oliver Baumann, speculated that it might be “possible to ‘immunise’ yourself against forgetting. ‘“If we are single-minded in what we want to do, nothing will stop us remembering. But if we have multiple things going on, forgetfulness becomes noticeable.’”
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. 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. 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".