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LIT-1385: Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Event structure or updating disruption?

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1081) from the publisher's PDF as posted on the second author's laboratory page at Notre Dame; worth holding as the paper that rules out a longer retention interval and a passing cost of updating, and sets the doorway effect's mechanism as competition between the two event models that hold the carried object, against the alternative that a prior event model has merely dropped out of working memory. In both experiments the effect was on the carried object only. Same lab, same paradigm, about 6 trials per cell for the critical condition.
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Tagscognition
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-1081 — Pettijohn & Radvansky — Doorways: event structure or updating disruption?
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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Pettijohn, K. A., & Radvansky, G. A. (2016). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Event structure or updating disruption? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(11), 2119–2129. doi:10.1080/17470218.2015.1101478.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1081. Pages are the journal’s.

  • Not time, not a passing disruption. Travel times were not longer through doorways, and a 3-second pause before the probe left the effect as it was.
  • On the carried object only, in both experiments: “this is largely confined to the associated probes” (p. 2123).
  • Competition, not dropout. Deactivation of the prior event model fits the object set down; “the result of central interest here is the effect of a shift in the associated condition, which lends itself to a competition-based account” (p. 2126).

Why this is here

A37 cited it for the interference account: the effect “wasn’t adequately explained by travel time or a brief transient processing disruption”. The case is CASE-136.

From the reading, 2026-10-22. The paper argues for interference between event models and against the account in which a prior event model has dropped out of working memory. The latter is closer to the activation interruption that CLAIM-421 illustrates with the doorway effect. See NOTE-1081.

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