Walking through doorways helps remembering, but not for long

The structure of events in which information has been learned can meaningfully impact memory, particularly for information that is encountered near an event boundary. Prior work has shown that separating a list of words into multiple events can improve later memory, suggesting that event structure could be leveraged for a benefit. That is, using event structure can help chunk a large set of information into more manageable units. Our aim was to replicate a prior finding that dividing a list of words to be learned in two rooms would improve later performance. Our results revealed that across two experiments, there was little evidence that memory was better when words were learned across two rooms rather than one. This did occur in one experiment, but only for words around the event boundary. However, this effect quickly dissipated after a short post-learning delay when a person moved through other rooms prior to testing.