The Enigmatic ‘Doorway Effect’: Why Do We Forget Our Intentions After Walking Through a Door?

“” “But what had come to get?” Or “But what am I doing here?”. These sentences, you surely said them, aloud or in your head, several times during your life. You wanted something, it was perhaps even important, but as soon as you have passed the door to the room that held the object you wanted, impossible to remember what it is. You are not crazy, or amnesiac, you simply experienced the“ doorway effect ”, the door effect.

Article initially published in January 2025

The door, a border that makes us forget

The brain is a particular organ in the human body. Without him, we just couldn't live. However, sometimes he can play tricks on us and be fooled by very simple things like a door, this is the case with the “Doorway Effect”.

Take an example.

You are in your room, playing a video game. All of a sudden, while the session has lasted for a long time, you are hungry. You remember that a packet of cakes is in the pantry and you leave to look for it. You come back 5 minutes later, without really knowing why you went to the pantry, without the pack of cakes and always hungry.

Welcome to the club, you have experienced the “Doorway Effect”. But then what happened between the time you left your room and when you came back?

Well your brain has compartmentalized the information and you, on your side, has crossed a physical border: a door.

“” “Entering or leaving a door serves as a “event border” in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and classes. It is difficult to remember the decision taken or the activity that has been taken in another room because it has been compartmentalized.“Explained Gabriel Radvansky in 2011, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), in a press release from the establishment.

In other words, the idea of ​​going to get the cakes because you were hungry was associated, by your brain, to be in your room. Once in the pantry, this idea was not available since you left the room it is from.

The “Doorway Effect” would not even need a real door to manifest

Studied many times for many years, there are three different studies published between 2011 and 2021 which deal with “Doorway Effect”. In July 2014, a study by two teachers from the Knox College (Illinois, USA) highlighted a surprising fact on the “Doorway Effect”.

Where the 2011 study demonstrated its effect by pressing the passage of the body through a physical door, the 2014 study demonstrated that the door did not need to actually exist to cause the “doorway effect”.

Indeed, according to the two teachers and to quote the title of their study, “Mentally crossing the doors causes oblivion”. Thus, even if we can question the usefulness of such a will, we could, of ourselves, decide to imagine passing through a door and mentally forgetting what we had decided, in our mind, why we had gone. While we did not move an inch.

What about virtual spaces?

Can this phenomenon are also transposed to video games or virtual environment? Have you ever forgotten for what quest, you had to go inside this house, once the door has passed?

Well, it seems that the “Doorway Effect” still has its limits. And it is using a study, published in 2021 in the journal BMC Psychologythat researchers have been able to show that the “Doorway Effect” did not appear on virtual environments.

To show it, researchers from Queensland Brain Institute (Australia) therefore asked volunteers to wear VR headsets and cross doors with a simple instruction: remember what they had seen on the tables arranged in the virtual space with each change of room.

Well, no concern at this level since the “Doorway Effect” had no effect. Perhaps the virtual environment is still too “imagined” for the brain to be fooled as easily or that it is a question of context.

If you are “locked up” in an environment that you know virtual, the brain will not act in the same way as if it were in real life, faced with real doors.

Source : Iflscience