News briefs

Unlocking the mysteries of the “doorway effect”

Researchers from Bond University believe they have solved the mystery of why people who go through doorways are prone to forgetting — the “doorway effect”. A 2011 study theorised that crossing the threshold caused the brain to refresh because memories from the old room were less likely to be relevant in the new room, but the Bond University study, published in BMC Psychology, offered a different perspective. The Bond researchers had participants wear virtual reality headsets and move through different rooms in a 3D virtual environment. They had to memorise objects such as a blue cone and a yellow cross on tables in each room and then move from one table to the next. Sometimes the next table was in the same room, and sometimes it was in another room entered through an automatic sliding door. “At first we couldn't find the doorway effect at all so we thought maybe people were too good — they were remembering everything,” the authors said. “Then we made it more difficult and got them to do backward counting tasks while moving around to load up their working memory. Forgetting did now occur, telling us that overloading the participants’ memory made them more susceptible to the effect of the doorway. In other words, the doorway effect only occurs if we are cognitively in a vulnerable state.” Even then, however, the observed effect was considerably less than in previous studies. “We believe this is because in our experiments the rooms were designed to be visually identical. There was no change of context happening when crossing a doorway, as was the case in the previous studies.”

https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-021-00536-3

Type 2 diabetes: unknown danger for women with gestational diabetes

Women who develop gestational diabetes are 10 times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes later in life, but only one‐third of these women realise that they are at high risk, according to South Australian research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The study examined the views of 429 Australian women with a history of gestational diabetes to establish their perceived risks of developing type 2 diabetes, potential barriers to losing weight, and useful strategies for supporting a healthy weight. “Being overweight is a common risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes, making post pregnancy weight loss important in preventing onset of this disease. In our study, while 75% of the women surveyed understood that they were overweight, this knowledge didn’t translate into a high level of perceived risk,” the authors said. “The priority is to educate both women with gestational diabetes, and the health professionals who care for them, to ensure greater communication and boost awareness of the risk factors these women have. This is critical, as close to a quarter of women in this study had not been tested for type 2 diabetes following a pregnancy with gestational diabetes.”

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/24/9180