Everybody forgets why they walked into a room from time t...

Forgetting why you entered a room is called the “Doorway Effect”, and it may reveal as much about the strengths of human memory, as it does the weaknesses, says psychologist Tom Stafford.

He then had a second group perform the same task between tables that were an equal distance apart, but in the same room. The difference in the two groups' performances was "big enough to drive a truck through," Radvansky told Life's Little Mysteries. Despite the simplicity of their task, "people were two to three times as likely to forget what they were supposed to do after walking through a doorway."

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains. “Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

Event boundaries can also lead to forgetting. According to EST, when event models are updated, information belonging to the prior event is discarded from working memory. This accounts for the short-term memory loss commonly experienced when people walk through doorways, or change tasks.

Half of the volunteers in the study said they forget why they entered the room at least once a week. But forgetting, even though frustrating, might not be as bad as you make it out to be.

The Queensland team said this chimes with everyday experience in that it’s mostly when we’re distracted, with our mind on other things, that we’re inclined to arrive in a room and forget what we came for.

Frequency: While there is no single confirmed statistic for the entire population, researchers describe it as a commonly reported everyday memory lapse. Adaptation, Not Defect: Researchers describe the Doorway Effect as reflecting how the brain ...

The study showed that the subjects’ memory functions were slower and less accurate when they were asked to bring items to the next room, as opposed to within the same room. “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates or divides episodes of activity and files them away,” said lead researcher Gabriel Radvansky.

In nerd terms, this short experience ... good news is that experiencing such forgettable episodes after entering another room does not tell you anything about your memory, intelligence, or cognitive abilities....