Sorry, I Left My Memory in the Other Room
By Gitika Ahuja
Nov 18, 2011 6:00am

Ever forget the reason why you walked into a room seconds after you enter, even though you know you are there for a reason? You stand in the doorway wondering, “I know I came in here for something!”

If you answered yes, you may go as far as to rationalize that this is why it happens: ‘Well, our lives are so overburdened, and that’s why so many of us buzz around like caffeinated cheetahs crossing things our mental checklists. So many things to remember: gym clothes, umbrella, kids’ soccer practice and piano lessons…’

And then it happens — just as you walk into another room to perform one of those super important tasks, you can’t, for the love of God, remember what it was! It’s annoying … and as it turns out, pretty common. A recent study out in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology validates this kind of forgetfulness and says the trigger may be as benign as passing through a doorway. Who knew?

The study authors refer to the phenomena as the “location-updating effect,” which suggests there may be a decline in memory when you move from one location to another. The location change doesn’t have to be dramatic; walking into the next room is all it takes. The study questions whether this memory lapse has to do with a shift in context or whether there is something more to be learned about how we experience certain environments.

The working theory is that when you enter a new room or environment, your brain works to update your understanding of what’s going on around you. As it turns out, this is a lot of work (it’s “effortful”, the authors say) for your buzzing brain.

...continues...

The study authors refer to the phenomena as the “location-updating effect,” which suggests there may be a decline in memory when you move from one location to another. The location change doesn’t have to be dramatic; walking into the next room is all it takes. The study questions whether this memory lapse has to do with a shift in context or whether there is something more to be learned about how we experience certain environments.

Ah, the art of rediscovering an old principle and giving it a new name to make it look like you discovered it.

The actual mechanism underlying the forgetting across contexts is stimulus control. Stimulus control is simply the description of the process whereby a contextual cue becomes associated with, and thus predicts, specific behaviors, thoughts, bodily functions, etc. People find this particular experiment "surprising" simply because it challenges the popular belief that our thoughts come about mostly through our own volition; that is, I decide that I need to go into the other room to get the stapler because I felt like getting a stapler. In actual fact, what is happening is that the environmental stimuli present in the room create a causal chain of events which leads to the thought "I need a stapler" and the following actions that involve looking for a stapler. As such, it's no surprise that once we leave the room with the environmental stimuli that produced the thought that sparked the search, we suddenly 'forget' what we were looking for. This was all covered a long time ago in White and Wixted's "Psychophysics of Remembering".

The important thing about linking your research to broader principles and established frameworks of knowledge is that if you try to make it too specific like the authors above, then you miss the bigger picture. In this case, understanding why we forget that we were looking for the stapler is an interesting phenomenon to study, the more interesting thing is realising that the basic principle that your experiment touches upon also explains addiction and why a lot of drug users overdose. Stemming from Siegel's "Evidence from Rats that Morphine Tolerance is a Learned Response" we now know that tolerance to drugs is, at least in part, a product of the context it is taken in. His demonstration involved heating up the paws of rats to induce a pain response, and administering morphine across sessions to observe how their tolerance developed. Control rats (with no pain relief) started experiencing pain at around 12 seconds, whereas the morphine rats didn't experience it until around 24 seconds. However, by about the fourth session, what we find is that the 'morphine rats' start experiencing pain at around 12 seconds, like the control group. So far, this is entirely expected - repeated exposure to drugs commonly producing a tolerance effect where we start needing more of the same drug to produce the original effect.

This is where it gets interesting. On the fifth session, after the rats had demonstrated complete tolerance to the drug, Siegel moved the rats to a new location and ran the exact same procedure again. This time the morphine response produced the same effect as it did in rats that had never received a morphine injection, and the rats didn't experience pain until around 28 seconds. In other words, simply changing the location of the rats completely removed the tolerance that had been built up to the morphine. The connection to drug users and overdose cases should be obvious here - for those drug users who tend to get high in the same place, they build up a tolerance and have to keep increasing their dose to get the same effect. This is fine when they take it in the same place, but when they go somewhere new, they essentially become someone with zero tolerance to their drug of choice and they're still taking the dosage level of a seasoned drug user; which gives us the overdose. You see this effect a lot when people have barbecues on the beach, or wine over brunch in a park etc, and people will comment about how "the heat makes you get drunk faster", but really the difference is the fact that they're no longer drinking in their lounge or at the pub, so their tolerance level is similar to a 15 year old boy who thinks beer tastes yucky.

Sorry, I've probably just killed your thread.

chairman bill wrote:Setting events, dear boy, setting events.

Only if we use dirty applied psychology jargon..

chairman bill wrote:Setting events, dear boy, setting events.

Like party planning?

Made of Stars wrote:I'm travelling at the moment, and left my laptop power cord at home. I walked down to the concierge to see if I could borrow one, and left my room key and wallet in my room...

I think that one has a different name.

John

Mr.Samsa wrote:This is where it gets interesting. On the fifth session, after the rats had demonstrated complete tolerance to the drug, Siegel moved the rats to a new location and ran the exact same procedure again. This time the morphine response produced the same effect as it did in rats that had never received a morphine injection, and the rats didn't experience pain until around 28 seconds. In other words, simply changing the location of the rats completely removed the tolerance that had been built up to the morphine. The connection to drug users and overdose cases should be obvious here - for those drug users who tend to get high in the same place, they build up a tolerance and have to keep increasing their dose to get the same effect. This is fine when they take it in the same place, but when they go somewhere new, they essentially become someone with zero tolerance to their drug of choice and they're still taking the dosage level of a seasoned drug user; which gives us the overdose. You see this effect a lot when people have barbecues on the beach, or wine over brunch in a park etc, and people will comment about how "the heat makes you get drunk faster", but really the difference is the fact that they're no longer drinking in their lounge or at the pub, so their tolerance level is similar to a 15 year old boy who thinks beer tastes yucky.

Out of all your insightful posts, this is probably the most useful to me. Get drunk in new places and I'll save a fortune. Cheers.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

The study authors refer to the phenomena as the “location-updating effect,” which suggests there may be a decline in memory when you move from one location to another. The location change doesn’t have to be dramatic; walking into the next room is all it takes. The study questions whether this memory lapse has to do with a shift in context or whether there is something more to be learned about how we experience certain environments.

Ah, the art of rediscovering an old principle and giving it a new name to make it look like you discovered it.

You tried to get me for fifteen cents right now.

That was a great post with some tasty links. Thanks.

The thing that stuck out for me on reading of the Notre Dame work was "doorways" in conjunction with being an artist named ellenjanuary - see the link? It got me thinking that the Romans, an urban population of apartment dwellers, had plenty of time to speculate on the nature of the cosmos and the workings of their own minds; it seems quite likely that experiencing the phenomena described in the OP reinforced the pattern of praying to Janus upon entering or leaving a building.

Considering that Janus was very minor in the scheme of things as far as mythology goes, it seems possible that such a real world connection to everyday life between "the creator" as described by Ovid and the people just may be the underlying meme that makes Christianity insidious.

In that manner, perhaps these considerations are something new from something old, no?

Clive Durdle wrote:Isn't there something else though? Our evolutionary experience would be like that of most animals now, continually changing contexts but with less clear boundaries, except obvious ones like moving from forest to open space, edges like rivers and beaches, day and night. Reasonably fluid boundaries.

But we now lived in a boxed, geometric environment, going through a door is a major threshold - liminal.

I understand research has shown people brought up in forests have great difficulty understanding cities. This phenomenon is possibly a result of us inventing straight lines and right angles and has fascinating implications for how we build our environments. Ship builders, Gaudi and Hobbit homes may be on to something...

http://clivedurdle.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... s-for-all/

Unlikely, I'd imagine, as the boundaries which determine the rate of forgetting aren't limited to discrete borders. Arguably, having less discriminable boundaries might reduce the effect a bit, but since the boundaries are abstract categories that we create, the actual boundaries aren't overly relevant. In other words, suppose we sleep in a small clearing in the woods. This has no discernible edges or doorways or windows, but after sleeping there for a while I'd come to think of it as "my sleeping area" and it would vaguely start at that tree over there and finish over by the shrub.

HughMcB wrote:Out of all your insightful posts, this is probably the most useful to me. Get drunk in new places and I'll save a fortune. Cheers.

That was, more or less, what I was getting at.

houseofcantor wrote:

Mr.Samsa wrote:

The study authors refer to the phenomena as the “location-updating effect,” which suggests there may be a decline in memory when you move from one location to another. The location change doesn’t have to be dramatic; walking into the next room is all it takes. The study questions whether this memory lapse has to do with a shift in context or whether there is something more to be learned about how we experience certain environments.

Ah, the art of rediscovering an old principle and giving it a new name to make it look like you discovered it.

You tried to get me for fifteen cents right now.

That was a great post with some tasty links. Thanks.

No problem

houseofcantor wrote:The thing that stuck out for me on reading of the Notre Dame work was "doorways" in conjunction with being an artist named ellenjanuary - see the link? It got me thinking that the Romans, an urban population of apartment dwellers, had plenty of time to speculate on the nature of the cosmos and the workings of their own minds; it seems quite likely that experiencing the phenomena described in the OP reinforced the pattern of praying to Janus upon entering or leaving a building.

Considering that Janus was very minor in the scheme of things as far as mythology goes, it seems possible that such a real world connection to everyday life between "the creator" as described by Ovid and the people just may be the underlying meme that makes Christianity insidious.

In that manner, perhaps these considerations are something new from something old, no?

Interesting idea, and it does make sense that there might be a connection there and it's possible that seemingly superstitious behaviors could in fact have been handy ways of avoiding these kinds of cognitive 'malfunctions'. For example, praying before and after going through a doorway has the behavioral effect of creating a 'bridge' or link between the two rooms, and could theoretically offset the forgetfulness that can occur.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Interesting idea, and it does make sense that there might be a connection there and it's possible that seemingly superstitious behaviors could in fact have been handy ways of avoiding these kinds of cognitive 'malfunctions'. For example, praying before and after going through a doorway has the behavioral effect of creating a 'bridge' or link between the two rooms, and could theoretically offset the forgetfulness that can occur.

A link to the Notre Dame work went into a blog post the other day. I'm evangelical in my atheism. I consider it would be beneficial for all to remove these dangerous memes and superstitions from our biology before they remove us from the ecology.

HughMcB wrote:

Mr.Samsa wrote:This is where it gets interesting. On the fifth session, after the rats had demonstrated complete tolerance to the drug, Siegel moved the rats to a new location and ran the exact same procedure again. This time the morphine response produced the same effect as it did in rats that had never received a morphine injection, and the rats didn't experience pain until around 28 seconds. In other words, simply changing the location of the rats completely removed the tolerance that had been built up to the morphine. The connection to drug users and overdose cases should be obvious here - for those drug users who tend to get high in the same place, they build up a tolerance and have to keep increasing their dose to get the same effect. This is fine when they take it in the same place, but when they go somewhere new, they essentially become someone with zero tolerance to their drug of choice and they're still taking the dosage level of a seasoned drug user; which gives us the overdose. You see this effect a lot when people have barbecues on the beach, or wine over brunch in a park etc, and people will comment about how "the heat makes you get drunk faster", but really the difference is the fact that they're no longer drinking in their lounge or at the pub, so their tolerance level is similar to a 15 year old boy who thinks beer tastes yucky.

Out of all your insightful posts, this is probably the most useful to me. Get drunk in new places and I'll save a fortune. Cheers.

Would you be able to expand on this Samsa? It just seems counter-intuitive to me that changing the location will change your bodies tolerance level (which is saying something as im a physics undergrad). Cheers

Joe09 wrote:Would you be able to expand on this Samsa? It just seems counter-intuitive to me that changing the location will change your bodies tolerance level (which is saying something as im a physics undergrad). Cheers

Basically it's just a form of conditioning - the conditioning of tolerance. Think Pavlov's dog, where he paired the auditory cue of the bell with the presentation of food, and after successive trials he found that just ringing the bell alone was enough to elicit the salivation response. This makes sense intuitively, right? As the body has essentially learnt that the bell sound indicates that food is coming up, and now produces the same effects as seeing food, or smelling food, or just being in the presence of food alone. Now, think of the same effect occurring when we inject someone with morphine. There will be the natural response to morphine, including the "tolerance" effects where the physiological functions change in order to process the drug and get it through the system as quickly as possible. However, because things like the environment and the act of injecting are linked with this physiological response in time (i.e. they are correlated), these extraneous variables become "paired" with this physiological response. That is, the environment or the act of injecting become conditioned to elicit the physiological response, in the same way that Pavlov's bell was conditioned to elicit the act of salivation.

The problem here is that when the drug is taken in the same place over and over again, the environment becomes an integral part of the tolerance response - so the tolerance is no longer simply a response to the drug itself. This means that when you remove someone from that environment, they no longer have that variable stimulating their tolerance response, which results in a weakened tolerance response (as it comes now purely from the drug itself). If the environment has been a factor every time you take your drug, e.g. if you only ever drink in a pub, then removing yourself from the pub can return your tolerance practically all the way back to when you first started drinking. But obviously, on a cognitive level, you now think that you can drink 10 pints of beer and be fine, because you do that all the time at the pub. This results in you getting shit-faced, and probably alcohol poisoning as well.

Think of it this way: Your body is a future-predicting machine. It works with correlations and associations to enact processes (both cognitive and biological). Sometimes, these correlations are wrong, or mistaken, and the body makes errors. As another powerful example of this, look at Ader and Cohen's (1975) study looking at how they suppressed the immune system of rats by giving them sweetened water. Initially, their experiment had nothing to do with conditioning the immune system, and they had accidentally paired the water with an immunosuppressant that they were working with, but they noticed that even though they had stopped giving the rats the immunosuppressant, all of the rats were dying. They followed it up experimentally to determine whether they did actually accidentally condition an immunosuppressant response, and they found that they did. There's a good summary here:

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of a placebo effect in
nonhuman animals involved conditioned immunosuppression in
rats. Ader and Cohen (1975) paired a novel saccharine-flavored
liquid with the immunosuppressant cyclophosphamide. After a
number of pairings, the saccharine solution administered alone
brought about a decreased immune response in the rats (Ader &
Cohen, 1975). The saccharin solution had become a CS (placebo),
capable of eliciting immunosuppression (the placebo effect).
Ader’s groundbreaking experiments caused a stir, for it was generally held at the time that conditioning procedures could not
influence the immune system (see Harrington, 1997). Many of
Ader’s results mesh well with the regularities uncovered in classical conditioning research. First, as would be predicted from the
general finding that a stronger US produces a stronger CR, rats
given two doses of cyclophosphamide during the conditioning
stage later exhibited greater conditioned immunosuppression than
those given only one dose. Second, the extent of immunosuppression depended on the schedule of reinforcement. Third, in the
absence of CS–US pairings, the conditioned immunosuppression
typically extinguished (Ader, 1985). The finding that immunosuppression can be conditioned has been well replicated (Ader &
Cohen, 1982, 1991; Ghanta, Hiramoto, Solvason, & Spector, 1987;
Krank & MacQueen, 1988; McCoy, Roszman, Miller, Keely, &
Titus, 1986).

Does that help explain it better?

That's really interesting, Samsa. And, from personal experience, true. Though I hadn't really thought about why it occurs. I just thought it was one of those strange things that was likely in my mind and not a real effect.

Thank you samsa, I understand better now.

How good is the body/mind at remembering these 'tolerance' locations? for example you spend 10 years drinking in this particular pub and have gained the local tolerance by doing so, then you move to another country and go to a new pub, obviously when you start there is no local tolerance factor and as you say its like drinking for the first time but if you spend the next 10 years going to this 'new' pub your local tolerance has built up again.

So the question is, if you were then to go back to the original pub, would your body/mind remember that local tolerance, or because you have not been there for 10years your body would essentially go back to stage one?

Joe09 wrote:Thank you samsa, I understand better now.

How good is the body/mind at remembering these 'tolerance' locations? for example you spend 10 years drinking in this particular pub and have gained the local tolerance by doing so, then you move to another country and go to a new pub, obviously when you start there is no local tolerance factor and as you say its like drinking for the first time but if you spend the next 10 years going to this 'new' pub your local tolerance has built up again.

So the question is, if you were then to go back to the original pub, would your body/mind remember that local tolerance, or because you have not been there for 10years your body would essentially go back to stage one?

Well, as you probably imagine, what is stored as a "location" is not a perfect photograph of your local pub. This strict kind of learning would be heavily resource-intensive (having to remember so many details), and it would make learning practically impossible if it were a general rule (as you'd have to learn, for example, how to ride a bike every time you ride a new bike). Instead what happens is that what you learn as a "location" is more generalised, and it can be individualised to a degree, so what gets stored are various salient cues. For a pub, this might be a large gathering of people, or a smokey atmosphere, or the smell of piss and vomit (depending on how dirty your local is), or whatever, and what happens with learning is that we get a thing called "stimulus generalisation", where certain responses to stimuli can be elicited by similar stimuli. For example, we've all been trained that "green" means go on a traffic light, but if one day we turned up and it was blue, we'd still go. There might be some hesitation and uncertainty, so the response is not as strong as it is to the initial trained stimulus, but it would ultimately produce the same effect. However, if the light was purple or brown, or some other colour that is further along the spectrum to green, then the likelihood of us responding to it as a green light will decrease (this gives us what's called a "generalisation gradient", where the strongest response occurs in the presence of the initial trained stimulus, and it decreases as the stimulus becomes more dissimilar in either direction).

You can easily imagine a similar thing occurring with the example of pubs, where if you're at a mate's place and everyone is smoking cigars and there's loud music in the background, then this is pretty similar to a pub atmosphere and so the tolerance response will still be pretty reasonable. The drinking and pub example is a bit difficult to portray the extent of this issue though as most people tend to drink in a number of places, or have done at some point in their life - e.g. different friend's houses, local park, the beach, at a concert, at the movies, or whatever. And so, for a lot of people, the tolerance response can be nearly independent of location (as long as it isn't a completely novel environment), meaning that we've essentially learnt that the location is irrelevant to the intoxicating effects that follow. But with drugs, since they are usually illegal, people tend to have to do them in the same place time and time again; somewhere they know is safe and where they are unlikely to get caught. So the problem occurs when somebody recommends that they do it in the bathroom of a club, or in the back of a car, or whatever, and they end up overdosing on amounts that they've been using since they were 15.

In other words, since people tend to do drugs consistently in the same room or environment over and over again, what happens is that they build up a very specific location that will elicit the tolerance response and so they are less likely to have a partial tolerance response to similar environments. And this, in turn, makes it incredibly easy to overdose.