Abstract
BackgroundThe ‘doorway effect’, or ‘location updating effect’, claims that we tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary. Previous research suggests that such a forgetting effect occurs both at physical boundaries (e.g., moving from one room to another via a door) and metaphysical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer). Here, we aimed to conceptually replicate this effect using virtual and physical environments.MethodsAcross four experiments, we measured participants’ hit and false alarm rates to memory probes for items recently encountered either in the same or previous room. Experiments 1 and 2 used highly immersive virtual reality without and with working memory load (Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Experiment 3 used passive video watching and Experiment 4 used active real-life movement. Data analysis was conducted using frequentist as well as Bayesian inference statistics.ResultsAcross this series of experiments, we observed no significant effect of doorways on forgetting. In Experiment 2, however, signal detection was impaired when participants responded to probes after moving through doorways, such that false alarm rates were increased for mismatched recognition probes. Thus, under working memory load, memory was more susceptible to interference after moving through doorways.ConclusionsThis study presents evidence that is inconsistent with the location updating effect as it has previously been reported. Our findings call into question the generalisability and robustness of this effect to slight paradigm alterations and, indeed, what factors contributed to the effect observed in previous studies.
Highlights
The ‘doorway effect’, or ‘location updating effect’, claims that we tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary
Previous research has demonstrated that long-term memory for the temporal order of items is better for items presented within the same room [4] or context [2, 22] than for items presented across different rooms or contexts
Overall, our findings across all four experiments suggest that the renowned “doorway effect” is likely to be more nuanced than originally thought, as it only emerged in the form of increased false alarms under considerable working memory load
Summary
The ‘doorway effect’, or ‘location updating effect’, claims that we tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary. Previous research suggests that such a forgetting effect occurs both at physical boundaries (e.g., moving from one room to another via a door) and metaphysical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer). Our experience of the world is continuous and rich with information To manage this constant stream of information, we segment our experience into events, which are stored as episodic memory for later retrieval [22]. Previous research has demonstrated that long-term memory for the temporal order of items is better for items presented within the same room [4] or context [2, 22] than for items presented across different rooms or contexts. Short-term memory is reduced for items that were presented before an event boundary.
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