The quiz was timed so that when they walked through a doorway, they were tested right afterwards. From time to time, the researchers gave them a pop quiz, asking which object was currently in their backpack. Other times, they had to walk the same distance, but through a door into a new room. Sometimes, to get to the next object the participant simply walked across the room. Whichever object they were currently carrying was invisible to them, as if it were in a virtual backpack. Their task was to pick up the object and take it to another table, where they would put the object down and pick up a new one. In the game, they would walk up to a table with a colored geometric solid sitting on it. Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin seated participants in front of a computer screen running a video game in which they could move around using the arrow keys. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “ Walking through doorways causes forgetting.” But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. So there's the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you've forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused-until you look down and see the cup. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.” In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You're sitting at your desk in your office at home.
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