Here's why you forgot the reason you walked into a room
No, it's not because you're being controlled like a Sim character.
If you've ever played 'The Sims', you'll know you can remove tasks you've chosen for your Sim.
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Just as they step into the kitchen, you delete the action. This leaves them standing there, looking around and probably wondering why they walked in to begin with.
But it’s not just video game characters who experience this phenomenon – humans do too, and there might actually be a scientific explanation for it.
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It’s actually quite a common (and mildly infuriating) occurrence we’ve all experienced.
While you might think you're just forgetful, there is a scientific reason for this called the "doorway effect".
Christian Jarrett, a cognitive neuroscientist and science writer, explains what the doorway effect is in a column for BBC Science Focus.
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The term refers to the moment when people forget why they've entered a room.
According to Jarrett, moving from one room to another creates a shift in context, with the doorway acting as a mental boundary that disrupts memory.
Our memories are divided into episodes; we find it trickier to recall information from earlier episodes; and, critically, when we walk through a doorway, it creates a new episode or ‘event boundary’ (thus making it more difficult to recall our purpose, which was stored in the previous memory episode).
This means our brains like to compartmentalise activities and information based on environmental context.
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When you move to a new room, your brain "resets" or updates its current understanding of the new environment.
A team of researchers at the University of Queensland took this concept further, and their findings were even more interesting.
They found that passing through doorways that joined identical rooms mostly didn’t impact memory – perhaps because there wasn’t enough of a changed context to create a significant event boundary. It was only when these researchers distracted their volunteers with a simultaneous secondary task that the doorways between identical rooms affected memory.
This is consistent with our everyday lived experience – when we're distracted or thinking about something else, it's easy to forget why we walked into a room in the first place.
It also suggests that a more significant change in context, moving from your garden to your kitchen, will cause the doorway effect to occur.
While there is no cure for this, researchers do suggest that you can try and focus on the task at hand when you move from one room to another.
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