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Walking through a doorway can make it harder to remember what you were just doing, which may be why you reach the next room and forget what you came for. Researchers read it as a sign that memory stores experience in episodes, not as one continuous recording.

Radvansky et al., 2011

MindScience

The story behind the card

In experiments published by Gabriel Radvansky and colleagues in 2011, people carried objects either from one room to another or across the same distance within a single room, in virtual and real settings. Memory for the objects dropped more after a doorway, and walking back to the first room did not restore it. The explanation offered is that the mind divides experience into events, and a doorway signals that one event has ended, so its details are filed away. Later work adds caution: in a 2021 series of experiments at Bond University, McFadyen and colleagues found no doorway effect in most conditions, only more memory errors when people were also holding other information in mind. A doorway is one possible cause of forgetting, not the whole story.

Türkçe oku
Bir kapıdan geçmek, az önce ne yaptığınızı hatırlamayı zorlaştırabilir; yan odaya gidip ne için geldiğinizi unutmanızın bir nedeni bu olabilir. Araştırmacılar bunu, belleğin yaşadıklarımızı kesintisiz bir kayıt olarak değil, ayrı bölümler hâlinde sakladığının işareti sayar.
Radvansky ve ekibi, 2011

Gabriel Radvansky ve ekibinin 2011'de yayımlanan deneylerinde katılımcılar nesneleri ya bir odadan ötekine ya da aynı mesafe boyunca tek bir odanın içinde taşıdı; deneyler hem sanal hem gerçek ortamlarda yapıldı. Kapıdan geçenler taşıdıkları nesneleri daha çok unuttu; ilk odaya geri dönmek de hafızalarını tazelemedi. Önerilen açıklamaya göre zihin yaşadıklarını olaylara böler; kapı bir olayın bittiğini haber verir ve o olayın ayrıntıları bir kenara kaldırılır. Sonraki çalışmalar temkinli olmak gerektiğini gösterdi: Bond Üniversitesi'nden McFadyen ve ekibinin 2021'deki deneylerinin çoğunda kapının bir etkisi görülmedi; hatalar yalnızca katılımcılar aynı anda başka bilgileri de akıllarında tutarken arttı. Yani kapı, unutkanlığın olası nedenlerinden yalnızca biridir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Doorway effect
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