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LIT-1392: Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space

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Properties6
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1083) from the publisher's free PDF at Springer (bronze open access); worth holding as the origin of the doorway effect and for what it actually found: a doorway, against walking as far within a room, raised errors and slowed answers for the object being carried, and did not affect the object just set down. The decisive experiment has 5 no-shift trials per condition, and the rooms on either side of a doorway also differed in size and wall pattern. Nothing in it concerns intentions; the explanation offered, the effort of updating a situation model, was later dropped by the same lab for interference.
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-1083 — Radvansky & Copeland — Walking through doorways causes 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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Radvansky, G. A., & Copeland, D. E. (2006). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space. Memory & Cognition, 34(5), 1150–1156. doi:10.3758/bf03193261.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1083. Pages are the journal’s.

  • The cost falls on the carried object. In Experiment 2, errors on the carried object rose from .05 to .14 after a doorway; the object just set down was unaffected. “Thus, making a spatial shift disrupted processing of currently relevant information” (p. 1154).
  • The authors’ explanation is situation-model updating: “entering a new room is a major change in the current situation, and this requires a person to update their situation model of the environment” (p. 1155).
  • Thin evidence. 5 no-shift trials per probe type per person; rooms on either side of a doorway differed in size and wall pattern; the task is recognizing two colour–shape labels.

Why this is here

The owner’s U37 proposed that the record’s account of perspective and grounding gives at least a partial explanation of the doorway effect. A37 cited this as the classic finding. The case is CASE-136.

From the reading, 2026-10-22. The paper concerns recognition of two object labels, not intentions, and the doorway’s cost fell on the carried object only. See NOTE-1083 and the Proposed THEORY-888.

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