Is there a word or phrase for walking into a room to get something but then forgetting what you went in there to get?


I'm fairly certain this has happened to all of us at some point: You go into a room to get something, but once you're there, you can't remember what you intended to get. It seems like a specific, common phenomenon like this must have a name, but I can't think of it. Does anyone know a name (either formal or slang) for this?


I don't want a general term like forgetfulness or absent-mindedness, which could apply to all sorts of forgetting, or a term for not being able to remember a certain word. I'm looking for a word or phrase that describes this one specific situation of forgetting what you need to get as soon as you go to get it.



Answer



In psychology, it is called doorway effect or location updating effect.



Researchers already know that walking from one space to another makes people more likely to forget tasks when compared to others who don’t make such a transition. Called “location-updating effect” the phenomenon also causes people transitioning between rooms (even virtual ones) to take more time while attempting to recall items from memory.


news.discovery.com



It happens both in virtual and real environments; and it is explained that leaving a place and entering a new one is served as an event boundary in the mind and memory refreshes itself for the new information.



This “doorway effect” appears to be quite general. It doesn't seem to matter, for instance, whether the virtual environments are displayed on a 66” flat screen or a 17” CRT. In one study, Radvansky and his colleagues tested the doorway effect in real rooms in their lab. Participants traversed a real-world environment, carrying physical objects and setting them down on actual tables. The objects were carried in shoeboxes to keep participants from peeking during the quizzes, but otherwise the procedure was more or less the same as in virtual reality. Sure enough, the doorway effect revealed itself: Memory was worse after passing through a doorway than after walking the same distance within a single room.


scientificamerican.com



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