Scientists at University of Notre Dame have found that memory is affected by space, by asking a group of students to do memory tasks while walking through a doorway. They found that subjects were statistically more likely to forget what they were thinking about, once they moved over a door’s threshold - a finding that backs up the old “what did I come in here for?” trope.

It’s a process called “compartmentalizing,” in which your brain categorizes thoughts and tasks according to the spaces they’re processed in. These so-called “event boundaries” link ideas to spaces – a fascinating insight, particularly for architects, who are fond of expounding on “the threshold” without particularly empirical evidence.

The study was published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Via.

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in Uncategorized

tagged brains, doors, event boundaries, memory, science, threshold

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