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agate Site Admin
Joined: 17 May 2006 Posts: 5694 Location: Oregon
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Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2012 7:42 pm Post subject: Doorways and remembering |
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Having trouble remembering why you went into a room? This article might be helpful.
From Berkeley Wellness Alerts, December 7, 2012:
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Doorway to Forgetfulness
If you sometimes forget why you went into a room--was it to make a phone call, take something out of the fridge, pick up a sweater?--you’re hardly alone. It happens to us all, young and old alike.
Research from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, offers an explanation for such memory lapse. The conclusion in short: the doorway is to blame.
In a series of experiments, college students moved through both real and computer-generated virtual rooms, after examining objects that were then concealed from them. The students had more trouble recalling what the objects looked like after they had passed through a doorway into a new room, compared to when they traveled an equal distance in the same room.
According to lead researcher Gabriel Radvansky, memory for recently experienced information is affected by the structure of the environment--and doorways, in particular, serve as a prominent “event boundary” in the mind that compartmentalizes memories, thus making you lose your train of thought as you walk between rooms. Most other things in your environment are more subtle and don’t have as big an impact on subsequent information processing.
Keep in mind, forgetting is not necessarily a bad thing, says Radvansky. “Sure, it’s bad when you want to remember and you forget. But the reason we don’t hold onto things when we go from one event to another is that those things are often no longer relevant. This kind of forgetting helps us switch gears from one situation to another.” Still, if you’re intent on remembering why you are going into the bedroom or kitchen, say, try mentally repeating your intentions to yourself as you cross the threshold.
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