Imagining walking through a doorway triggers increased forgetting

We've all had that experience of going purposefully from one room to another, only to get there and forget why we made the journey. Four years ago, researcher Gabriel Radvansky and his colleagues stripped this effect down, showing that the simple act of passing through a doorway induces forgetting. Now psychologists at Knox College, USA, have taken things further, demonstrating that merely imagining walking through a doorway is enough to trigger increased forgetfulness. Zachary Lawrence and Daniel Peterson divided 51 students into two groups. One group spent a minute familiarising themselves with a large, furnished room. The other group wandered round the same room, but this one was divided in two by drapes, with a doorway connecting the two separated areas.Next the participants were shown an abstract swirly image, and asked to remember it as they closed their eyes and imagined walking from the podium to the piano in the room they'd just experienced. For the second group only, this imagined walk meant passing through the room's doorway (but the walk was the same distance as the other group's). After imagining the walk in the room, both groups had to pick out the image they'd been shown earlier from an array of ten alternatives. The group who'd imagined passing through a doorway performed worse at the task than the first group who didn't have to go through a doorway. This result fits with the Event Horizon Model, which explains the forgetting effect of doorways in terms of the...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs