Do you get up to do something, walk into another room and then don't remember what you were going to do? Don't worry you're not going senile yet because it's actually the door's fault.

According to a new study from Gabriel Radvansky, a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame passing though doorways is the cause of these brief memory lapses.

"Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," Radvansky explains.

"Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

Radvansky, who published the study recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, conducted three experiments in both real and virtual environments. Radvansky had her subjects- all college students- perform various memory tasks while walking through a doorway.

In the first experiment, the participants moved from one room to another to exchange one object on a table for an object at a different table in the next room. They performed the same task but this time they stayed in the same room and didn't go through a door.

In the second experiment, the subjects had to conceal in boxes the objects they had to move from one room to the next. The final experiment had the subjects moving through several doorways leading back to the room where they started.

Radvansky found that in each of the experiments the subjects forgot what they were going to do after walking through a doorway compared to just moving across the room. Even in the third experiment where subjects had passed several doorways, the results showed no improvements in memory.

This act of forgetfulness can be explained because doorways serve as a symbolic chapter marker in human brains. Doorways indicate a new chapter for the brain which makes it harder to retrieve older memories because they've been relegated to the past.

People can perform simple memory tricks to keep from forgetting things they want to do whenever they pass through a doorway. Radvansky suggests that you should carry physical reminders of what you intend to do.

"For example, if you want to go from the living room to the kitchen to get a snack, you may forget why you went to the kitchen when you get there because this is a new event, and you may have been distracted. But, it would be easier to remember if you walked into the kitchen with something to remind yourself of what you wanted, such as a bowl."