Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Younger and older adults.

Abstract

Previous research on event cognition has found that walking through doorways can cause forgetting. The explanation for this finding is that there is a competition between event models, producing interference, and depressing performance. The current study explored the degree to which this might be affected by the natural aging process. This is of interest because there is some evidence that older adults have trouble coordinating sources of interference, which is what is thought to underlie this effect. This would suggest that older adults should do worse on this task. Alternatively, there is also evidence that older adults are typically not disrupted at the event level of processing per se. This would suggest that older adults should perform similarly to younger adults on this task. In the study reported here, younger and older participants navigated through a virtual environment, and memory was tested with probes either before or after a shift and for objects that were associated with the participant (i.e., just picked up). In general, both younger and older adults had memory disrupted after walking through a doorway. Importantly, the magnitude of this disruption was similar in the 2 age groups. This is consistent with the idea that processing at the event level is relatively unaffected by the natural aging process. (PsycINFO Database Record

Effects of cues to event segmentation on subsequent memory

“…In this regard, our findings align with an investigation of event processing in a recent study with similar age groups (Radvansky, Pettijohn, & Kim, 2015). As younger and older adults passed through a virtual doorway with an object in their hand, they were equally likely to forget the name of the object.…”

Event boundaries in memory and cognition

“…The location updating effect is also not a matter of sensory-perceptual processing: it occurs for imagined doorways [78], for doorways separated by a transparent “glass” wall [79], and occurs when there is time to allow participants to process the sensory and perceptual transients [80]. Finally, it should be noted that recent work [81] has shown that this pattern of performance was similar in younger and older adults suggesting that they manage their event models in long-term memory similarly.…”

Location-based prospective memory

“…Because of this, changes in location often result in event model updating, with new locations serving as the bases for new events (Glenberg, Meyer, & Lindem, 1987;Morrow, Bower, & Greenspan, 1989;Morrow, Greenspan, & Bower, 1987). For instance, Radvansky and colleagues Radvansky & Copeland, 2006;Radvansky, Krawietz, & Tamplin, 2011;Radvansky, Pettijohn, & Kim, 2015;Radvansky, Tamplin, & Krawietz, 2010) have found that when people move from room to room in a virtual environment, there is forgetting of information as a person walks through a doorway, going from one spatial framework to another.…”