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Does this happen to you often?

He ran upstairs to get the key, but as soon as he entered the bedroom, he suddenly broke into pieces and forgot what he was looking for; opened the refrigerator door and was ready to reach for something, but suddenly found the reason why he forgot to open the refrigerator; and eagerly interrupted his friend's conversation. When you were about to speak, you forgot what you were just about to say.

"Hey? what was I going to say?" "how am I supposed to know?" | gifer's temporary amnesia often bothers us and makes us doubt ourselves, such as whether I am old or not. Or is it that my memory has declined?

In one study, the researchers ruled out other distractions in the real world and asked participants to wear VR glasses to enter a virtual world made up of a series of rooms. In this world, every room has a table with an object on it. The task of the participants is to move between different tables, moving each object from the previous table to the next (there is cross-room transfer and no cross-room transfer). In the process of moving, a detector will ask participants questions, such as the shape and color of the object that has just been placed on the table or picked up. The participants gave a variety of descriptions, either consistent with the object they were carrying, or with the object on the previous table, or fabricated an object and color out of thin air.

The results of reference [1] show that at the same distance, participants who walk through the door are more likely to forget the color and shape of their belongings than those who complete the task in the same room. and every time they go through a door, the probability of memory errors increases.

Not only that, but virtual doors have the same effect. For example, you quit other software, opened Wechat to reply to a message, but read the article that brought science home for half an hour; opened the browser, wanted to send an email, but clicked on celebrity gossip. An hour later, I patted my head and found that I had forgotten what I was going to do.

This effect is named by scientists as the doorway effect (Doorway Effect). What kind of magic does the gate have? And why is that?

Drip! Memory erasure! | Gifer, don't worry! This brief forgetfulness is not because there is something wrong with the brain, but rather illustrates the complex process that the brain processes and remembers information.

We can only remember a certain amount of information at a time, and the brain is charged with the task of "identifying and processing all kinds of information" at any time, attention moves between different levels of action, and memory is very dependent on our environment. When the brain receives a lot of new information (that is, when the environment changes dramatically), it throws away some information it considers useless (that is, information in the old environment) and focuses on current events. This is not only to lighten the burden on ourselves, but also to enable us to adapt to changes in the environment more quickly and be aware of the potential risks in the current environment.

On the other hand, the "door" assumes the "event boundary" that the brain uses to determine that memory should be removed.

If you want to blame it, just blame the door! Gifer however, in 2021, the latest study of the doorway effect by the Jessica McFadyen research team at Bond University suggested that multitasking may be the culprit that causes us to sometimes forget why we enter the room.

The Jessica McFadyen research team did four experiments. Experiment 1 and experiment 2 accurately copied the virtual world constructed in the previous Radvansky experiment. The difference is that experiment 2 assigned participants a task (counting down loudly according to a given number) on the basis of experiment 1, assuming that previous events are more likely to be forgotten when the tasks are parallel.

In experiment 3, participants were asked to sit in a room, memorize 16 photos of butterfly species for 30 seconds, and then watch a video of a person walking through a corridor with layers of door curtains from a first-person perspective. As in experiment 2, participants were also required to countdown a given number. The process of experiment 4 was basically the same as that of experiment 3, in which participants passed through the real corridor and then reordered 16 disturbed photos of butterflies at the end of the experiment.

The results of four experiments in reference [2] show that whether by watching video or actually moving in the real environment, the doorway effect does not affect memory. What really affects our memory is that we perform multiple tasks at the same time and the brain is overloaded. In other words, the doorway effect occurs only when we are cognitively vulnerable.

Indeed, at a time when the Internet and social media are generating countless content every minute, it is difficult for us to build a solid cognitive defense. Raconteur Media, a British content marketing agency, has estimated that by 2025, the world will create data of 463EB (463 * 10 ^ 18 bytes, equivalent to about 210 million DVD discs) every day. Attention has become a scarcity.

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Surprise inspection! Seeing here, did you forget what you were going to do?

Reference:

[1] Radvansky, G.A., Copeland, D.E. Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space. Memory & Cognition 34, 1150-1156 (2006). Https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193261

[2] McFadyen, J., Nolan, C., Pinocy, E. Et al. Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation. BMC Psychol 9, 41 (2021). Https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00536-3

[3] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160307-why-does-walking-through-doorways-make-us-forget

This article is from the official Wechat account: bring Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: everything.

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