Long-term memory
How doorways and walls shape our long-term memories
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Passing through a doorway weakens our ability to remember the order of events that happened on either side of it, even when the time and distance between them are controlled.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Spatial transitions, such as crossing a virtual boundary or doorway, automatically segment continuous experiences, which significantly impairs our ability to recall the sequence of events across those boundaries.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Events are consolidated as structured units, not as an undifferentiated stream.
What is consolidated is shaped by the structure imposed at encoding. Coherent narratives raised recalled detail for distant events (d = 0.62 and 0.41 across sleep and wake groups), and crossing a spatial boundary between two objects reduced later memory for their order even after physical distance and elapsed time were controlled.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Virtual-context objects judged as next vs before; within- vs across-context temporal memory
- N
- N=43 · UCL subject pool; 22 next-object, 21 before-object
- Population
- Adults recruited through the UCL Psychology Subject Pool
- Outcome
- Temporal-order memory for objects within versus across spatial-context boundaries
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Inspect source passages
How doorways and walls shape our long-term memories
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
three experiments
Across three experiments we show that spatial boundaries play an important role in this segmentation process.
144 colour objects
144 colour objects were used, a subset of those used in , half man-made, half natural.
Key findings
Across all tests, participants were significantly better at remembering the correct order of objects when both were encountered within the same room compared to when they were in adjacent rooms. This spatial boundary effect persisted even after controlling for physical distance, walking speed, and the amount of time participants spent viewing each object. Interestingly, participants performed at chance when asked to identify the exact room in which an object had appeared, suggesting that spatial boundaries shape memory structure automatically without requiring conscious recall of the environment.
Methodology
In three experiments, college students navigated virtual rooms on a computer, categorizing 144 everyday objects. In each room, they encountered objects sequentially, meaning some pairs were experienced in the same room while other pairs were separated by a doorway. Afterward, memory was tested in three ways, with a focus on determining whether a cued object came immediately before or after another.
Limitations
While the study shows that spatial boundaries disrupt sequential memory, it does not explain the exact brain mechanisms involved, although the authors hypothesize a role for the medial temporal lobe. The study was conducted entirely in virtual reality environments on desktop screens, which may not capture the full physical and vestibular experiences of navigating real-world spaces. Additionally, because the memory tests occurred shortly after the encoding phase, the findings do not clarify how these event boundaries affect memory retrieval over days, weeks, or years. Finally, the experiments only tested healthy young adults, so the results may not generalize to older populations or those with cognitive impairments.
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