Walking through doorways causes forgetting: environmental effects

Previous work has shown a decline in memory for objects carried through a doorway versus across a room. The aim of the current study is to extend this work to understand how variations in perceptual experience during these event shifts influence this finding. First a change in procedure to reduce memory load to a single item was assessed. Next we explored whether performance is influenced by spatial distance versus spatial categories, the ability to perceptually preview the next location, and changes in the colour and texture of the walls. The location updating effect was consistently observed for all manipulations, suggesting that such event transformations have a robust influence on human memory. This suggests that event cognition is driven more by the use of perceptual information to infer or impose a categorical shift from one event to another rather than by the nature of perceptual information available at the time.