Doorway effect
psychological phenomenon of short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another
The doorway effect is a unusual occurrence that happens in the brain. This effect usually happens due to short-term memory loss while going through a door.[1] Humans tend to forget recent information once crossing a boundary and often forget what they are thinking or planning to do after entering a different room.[2][3]
Research says that this happens in both real life boundaries (ex: moving into a different room using a door) and imaginary/virtual boundaries (ex: switching desktop windows using the Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut on Windows or the Cmd+Tab keyboard shortcut on MacOS).[2]
References
change- ↑ Radvansky, Gabriel A.; Tamplin, Andrea K.; Krawietz, Sabine A. (2010-12-01). "Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Environmental integration". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 17 (6): 900–904. doi:10.3758/PBR.17.6.900. ISSN 1531-5320.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 McFadyen, Jessica; Nolan, Christopher; Pinocy, Ellen; Buteri, David; Baumann, Oliver (2021-03-08). "Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation". BMC Psychology. 9 (1): 41. doi:10.1186/s40359-021-00536-3. ISSN 2050-7283. PMC 7938580. PMID 33685514.
- ↑ Stafford, Tom. "Why does walking through doorways make us forget?". www.bbc.com. Retrieved 2022-02-13.