On Forgetting Why You Went to the Basement (Or... On Seniors Moments)
Don’t worry, you’re not losing your marbles (yet!). Going into another room and forgetting what you came in there for is very common and is a result of the Doorway Effect.
Like many, I live in a house with a basement. Like many, I go downstairs to get something, and only realize I forgot about grabbing that thing when I got back upstairs. (But I did something productive while down there… I just can’t remember what).
Good news for me, and probably you too, this isn’t very (very) early onset Alzheimer’s or the result of too many sport-related concussions. Although both conditions seem like very real possibilities in my mind thanks to the Availability Heuristic, instead it’s actually a common occurrence known as “The Doorway Effect”.
The Doorway Effect has less to do with your age (actually, research found that walking through a doorway caused forgetting regardless if you were old or young) and more to do with how our memory functions.
Suffering Succotash!
The Doorway Effect
The Doorway Effect has been explained by both the kind of memory you were trying to hold on to and the change in context that happens when you pass from one environment to the next.
There seems to be a form of memory for ‘ready-on-hand’ information, known as working memory, involved in a process of information intake that helps us make sense of the context in our immediate vicinity so as to guide our behaviour. The information held in our working memory helps build a ‘situational model’. Take the example of a doctor’s office, if someone with a stethoscope approaches, we aren’t surprised when she asks to listen to our heart and we are likely to comply. Seeing that stethoscope and the cues of the doctor’s office, holding it as working memory and comparing it to our existing understandings of the world, allows us to think ah okay, it’s fine that this person is all up in my business because she is my doctor, and voila we agree to take deep breaths when she asks. However, once we are in a new context, we can let go of the ready-on-hand information and purge it in favour of new stuff, to take in new and more immediate information for our next context.
To help with processing these episodes for our long-term memory, we interpret boundaries that end one segment and start another (i.e., like walking through a doorway into a new room). This is known as an ‘event boundary’, and this fresh context vacates the ready-on-hand information we were holding in the previous ‘room’, or at least some details held in the working memory are lost. So you go into a new room intent on grabbing a new bottle of ketchup, and instead see the shirt you wanted to wear now clean from the laundry. You emerge from the basement with the shirt and no ketchup – which is probably good news for your shirt, but I digress…
Virtual Doorway Effect
Troubleshooting
Now that we understand that walking through a doorway cues an event boundary and risks us letting go of the thoughts we were holding in our working memory, what could we possibly do about it?
Try deliberately segmenting the different moments differently. If I think of being upstairs and heading downstairs to grab a particular book as part of the same episode, I might be less likely to forget.
Try associating a non-typical task you are trying to achieve with a routine task you know you will do regardless – like remembering, in my case, to pack my gym shoes when I pick out my work outfit in the morning.
Have your task as the last thing in your mind before entering the new space. Or repeating/mumbling the word as you enter a new space or writing yourself a note.
There was a last thing I wanted to add but, alas, I forget!
Love,
