# University study separates the doorway from the act of opening it

> A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions finds that an automatic door costs memory no more than an open archway does, and that a door a person opens for themselves costs more than either.

> Most of the doors I pass through in a week are no longer anything I do. I had not thought to ask what that had done to the week, and I am not certain we have answered it, but we have at least asked it of a hundred and thirty-six people.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

The question belongs to _Who Opened the Door? Agency at the Spatial Boundary and the Location-Updating Cost in Memory for Carried Objects_, a paper by Dr Emenike with Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow in the School, and Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities.

It has been known for some time that people remember what they are carrying a little less well once they have walked through a doorway. The paper asks which part of a door is responsible. Participants carried objects along a virtual corridor through open archways, through doors that slid aside on approach, and through doors they opened themselves. The archway and the automatic door cost memory the same modest amount. The door the participant opened cost roughly as much again, and a second experiment found that pressing a key at the moment a door happened to open cost nothing at all.

The paper connects the experimental study of memory with a body of theory about how experience is divided into episodes, and positions the ordinary door at the point where the two meet. Its authors offer no advice on how a building should be fitted.

For a school whose business is ordinarily conducted below ground level, the University considers a corridor a creditable distance to have come. Dr Obiora said the work had left him "more attentive at thresholds, and no quicker through them".

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wrr6vs.