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LIT-1384: Walking through Doorways Causes Forgetting: Further Explorations

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Properties6
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1082) from the publisher's PDF as posted on the first author's laboratory page at Notre Dame; worth holding for the return-to-the-room result and the authors' account of it: returning to the room where objects were picked up did not help, two new rooms were worse than one, and the authors explain the effect as retrieval interference between event models that both hold the carried object, not as loss of a context or of activation. The real-room experiment changes the task and its effect is p = .02 to .06; the plain shift effect in the return experiment is marginal on errors. No goal or intention is manipulated, so the reading that perspective is a goal-sensitive relation rather than a location is not tested here.
Version2
Tagscognition, embodied-cognition
ReportsCASE-136 — The doorway effect: memory for an object carried through a doorway into another room is worse than after walking as far within one, returning to the first room does not restore it, and outside the original laboratory's set-up the effect has not always appeared
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1082 — Radvansky et al. — Walking through doorways causes forgetting: further explorations
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-888 — Walking through a doorway into a new room, rather than as far within one, lowers recognition of an object being carried, through retrieval interference between the event models of the two rooms that both hold it, not through a longer retention interval, a passing cost of updating, or loss of the encoding context; outside the originating paradigm, with passive movement and no extra load, it has not appeared

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Radvansky, G. A., Krawietz, S. A., & Tamplin, A. K. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(8), 1632–1645. doi:10.1080/17470218.2011.571267.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1082. Pages are the journal’s.

  • Smaller displays and real rooms. The effect held on 17-inch monitors (A′ .97 against .93) and in a real three-room lab with a modified task (A′ .86 against .82, p = .03).
  • Returning does not help. “Memory did not improve by reinstating this context” (p. 1632): A′ .92 after a shift, .90 after going and returning, .86 after two new rooms. Memory tracked “the number of new areas entered” (p. 1640).
  • The account is interference. A carried object is in two event models, “which compete with one another at retrieval” (p. 1633), “a kind of a fan effect”.

Why this is here

A37 cited the finding that returning to the original room did not restore memory, and drew from it that “our theory shouldn’t reduce perspective to location”. The case is CASE-136.

From the reading, 2026-10-22. The return result shows that the encoding location does not reinstate access. It does not show that the relevant context is “goal-sensitive”: no goal or task was varied, and on the authors’ account each room entered is a new event model, so the unit is still room-bound. A37’s own proposed variants (a doorway crossed while a salient task continues; a change of task with no doorway) would test that. See NOTE-1082.

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