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LIT-1387: Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1079) from the publisher's text in PubMed Central (PMC7938580, CC BY 4.0); worth holding as the record's only test of the doorway effect outside the originating lab: in passive head-mounted VR doorways did not lower hits (Bayes factors 3–6 for the null), under a counting load they raised false alarms to recombined probes, and a curtained hallway, watched or walked, did not affect memory for a 16-item arrangement. Conceptual rather than direct replications: movement was passive and the hallway task was different. Its one positive finding fits the interference account.
Version2
Tagscognition, psychometrics
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-1079 — McFadyen et al. — Doorways do not always cause forgetting
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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McFadyen, J., Nolan, C., Pinocy, E., Buteri, D., & Baumann, O. (2021). Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation. BMC Psychology, 9, 41. doi:10.1186/s40359-021-00536-3.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1079. The XML has no page breaks; references are to sections.

  • No loss of hits. “Across this series of experiments, we observed no significant effect of doorways on forgetting” (Abstract).
  • Confusion under load. With a counting task, d′ fell after a doorway because false alarms to recombined probes rose: “under working memory load, memory was more susceptible to interference after moving through doorways” (Abstract).
  • Conceptual, not direct. Movement in VR was passive and rooms were identical; the hallway experiments used curtains and a spatial-arrangement task. The authors also fault prior studies for few, unbalanced trials.

Why this is here

A37 cited it as evidence that the doorway effect “isn’t perfectly robust”, and A39 asked that its mixed findings be kept. The case is CASE-136.

From the reading, 2026-10-22. The paper is the record’s only non-replication; it cites independent positive studies the record does not hold (Lawrence & Peterson 2016; Seel et al. 2019). Its one positive result fits the interference account of LIT-1385. See NOTE-1079.

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