Question: why do we sometimes forget why we walked through a door or into a room? i know it's partly because we segment off different areas in our mind and they are perceived as different events, but i was wondering if there was a more detailed or different explanation

Michael Craig answered on 13 Mar 2013:

Hi,

Good question. This is what we call prospective memory, remembering to do things. Recent research has found exactly that, we sometimes forget what we were going to do when we walk through a door. This has been called a “doorway effect” or “location-updating effect” where our brain tries to update to our new surroundings. We’re not exaclty sure why this happens, there is two theories, one is that walking through the doorway causes you to forget as your brain is updating itself and taking in the information of the new room your in. The second theory is that you forget as its harder to remember the information you want to remember in a different room, and it would be easier to remember it in the first room.

This is a very interesting suggestion and has been well documented in the past. One example is where researchers got deep sea divers to go underwater and learn new information. They then tested their memory back in the water and on land and they found that they rememebered a lot more information when they were underwater compared to on land. It might be this effect which causes us to forget when we go in to a new environment (i.e. through a doorway).

Hope that helps!
Michael