The 'doorway effect' or ‘location updating effect’, is a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place.[1] It claims that we tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary[2] and is often experienced by forgetting what one was thinking about or planning on doing upon entering a different room.[3] Research suggests that this phenomenon occurs both at physical boundaries (e.g.
, moving from one room to another via a door), and metaphysical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer).[2]
I forget how I found this.
So I’m not crazy when I get upstairs and can’t remember why I went up there.
well, that depends….