Imagine that you are watching your favorite movie and decide to go to the kitchen for meals. But when you come to the kitchen, suddenly stop and ask yourself: "Why am I here?" Such failures in memory may seem random. But the researchers are called the culprit "The Effect of the Doorway".
Rooms are the border between one context, such as living room, and another kitchen. If the memory is overloaded, the border "flips" the latest tasks - and a person forgets, why came to a new place.
A group of Australian scientists decided to carefully examine this effect. They selected 29 volunteers on which the VR headsets were put on and asked to move from the room to the room in a virtual environment. During the experiment, participants had to memorize the items: a yellow cross, a blue cone and so on, lying on the "tables". Sometimes the items were in the same room, and sometimes the subjects had to move out of the room into the room to find everything.
It turned out that doorways did not prevent respondents in any way. They equally successfully remembered the figures regardless of whether in the same room or in different.
Then scientists repeated the experiment. This time they selected 45 participants and asked them simultaneously with the search for items to perform a task to the account. And the "doorway effect" worked. Volunteers were mistaken in the score or forgot about items when they moved from the room to the room. Scientists came to the conclusion that the second task overloaded the memory and caused "gaps" in it when people crossed the doorway.
In the third experiment, 26 participants have already watched the video taken from the first person. The operator moved along the university corridors, and respondents had to memorize photos of butterflies on the walls. In the fourth experiment, they walked on this route on their own. Researchers noticed that in these cases the "doorway effect" was again absent. That is, when a person has no additional tasks, the crossing of the borders does not play any role.
The results of the work published in the BMC psychology journal showed: the more multitasked the person, the higher the likelihood that the "doorway effect" will work. This is because we can keep in the mind only a certain amount of information. And the working memory is overloaded when we are distracted by something new.
According to scientists, a person is able to forget some tasks not only in the "doorway". The brain "segmented events" constantly (so it better processes information), and the effect is manifested in different conditions. And to avoid it, you need to control the number of tasks that we are busy and focus on affairs.
Source: Naked Science