Reference
Gabriel Radvansky
The doorway experiments, and the event horizon model used to explain them, come from his lab.
Radvansky studies memory, comprehension and how people understand events. With Copeland in 2006, and with Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin in 2011, he reported that memory for recently handled objects was worse after moving through a doorway than after covering the same distance within a room, in both virtual and real rooms. He calls this the location updating effect and explains it with the event horizon model, in which information from the current event is more available than information from the previous one.
What we are relying on him for is the finding and the model, and neither is settled. McFadyen and colleagues reported four conceptual replications in 2021 that mostly found no effect of doorways. The effect appeared only as more false alarms under working memory load, which is hard to square with information simply being lost at the door.
Referenced work
- Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space (with Copeland, Memory and Cognition, 2006) reference
- Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations (with Krawietz and Tamplin, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2011) reference
- Across the event horizon (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2012) reference
Elsewhere
Listed here because we name Gabriel Radvansky in our writing. We are not affiliated with them and this page is our summary, not theirs.