Zeigarnik effect

Last updated

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect, named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.

Contents

The Zeigarnik effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect. Maria Ovsiankina, a colleague of Zeigarnik, investigated the effect of task interruption on the tendency to resume the task at the next opportunity. [1]

Overview

Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik first studied the phenomenon after professor and Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed that a waiter had better recollections of still unpaid orders. [2] However, after the completion of the task — after everyone had paid — the waiter was unable to remember any more details of the orders. Zeigarnik then designed a series of experiments to uncover the processes underlying the phenomenon. The research report was published in 1927, in the journal Psychologische Forschung. [3]

The advantage of remembrance can be explained by looking at Lewin's field theory: a task that has already been started establishes a task-specific tension, which improves cognitive accessibility of the relevant contents. [4] The tension is relieved upon completion of the task, but persists if it is interrupted. Through continuous tension, the content is made more easily accessible, and can be easily remembered. [4]

The Zeigarnik effect suggests that students who suspend their study to perform unrelated activities (such as studying a different subject or playing a game), will remember material better than students who complete study sessions without a break (McKinney 1935; Zeigarnik 1927). [5] [6]

Harden rule

Sportswriter Matt Moore has suggested that the Zeigarnik effect could explain the widespread criticism of the National Basketball Association in allowing free throws for a player "chucking it up whenever a guy comes near them". [7] There is a stoppage of play with each foul. When repeatedly done, it is felt to build up a cognitive bias against this move. The criticism necessitated a rule change penalizing this activity, known as the Harden Rule, named after its most prominent user, James Harden. [8] [9]

Criticism

The reliability of the effect has been a matter of some controversy. [10]

Several studies, performed later in other countries, attempting to replicate Zeigarnik's experiment, failed to find any significant differences in recall between "finished" and "unfinished" (interrupted) tasks, for example Van Bergen (1968). [11]

Usages

Software

The Zeigarnik effect is used in some SaaS (Software as a service) systems to onboard users faster and effectively.[ citation needed ]

Usually, it is implemented as user interactions gamification. Examples include:

See also

Related Research Articles

Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Wertheimer</span> Austro-Hungarian psychologist (1880–1943)

Max Wertheimer was a psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. He is known for his book, Productive Thinking, and for conceiving the phi phenomenon as part of his work in Gestalt psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Köhler</span> German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy(GTP) is a method of psychotherapy based strictly on Gestalt psychology. Its origins go back to the 1920s when Gestalt psychology founder Max Wertheimer, Kurt Lewin and their colleagues and students started to apply the holistic and systems theoretical Gestalt psychology concepts in the field of psychopathology and clinical psychology. Through holism, "a person's thinking, feeling, actions, perceptions, attitudes and logical operations" are seen as one unity. Many developments in psychotherapy in the following decades drew from these early beginnings, like e.g. group psychoanalysis (S. Foulkes), Gestalt therapy (Laura Perls, Fritz Perls, Goodman, and others), or Katathym-imaginative Psychotherapy (Hanscarl Leuner).

The Von Restorff effect, also known as the "isolation effect", predicts that when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered. The theory was coined by German psychiatrist and pediatrician Hedwig von Restorff (1906–1962), who, in her 1933 study, found that when participants were presented with a list of categorically similar items with one distinctive, isolated item on the list, memory for the item was improved.

Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception. It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.

In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the amount of working memory resources used. However, it is essential to distinguish it from the actual construct of Cognitive Load (CL) or Mental Workload (MWL), which is studied widely in many disciplines. According to work conducted in the field of instructional design and pedagogy, broadly, there are three types of cognitive load: intrinsic cognitive load is the effort associated with a specific topic; extraneous cognitive load refers to the way information or tasks are presented to a learner; and germane cognitive load refers to the work put into creating a permanent store of knowledge. However, over the years, the additivity of these types of cognitive load has been investigated and questioned. Now it is believed that they circularly influence each other.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Lewin</span> German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career, Lewin's academic research and writings focuses on applied research, action research, and group communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ehrenstein illusion</span> Optical illusion

The Ehrenstein illusion is an optical illusion of brightness or color perception. The visual phenomena was studied by the German psychologist Walter H. Ehrenstein (1899–1961) who originally wanted to modify the theory behind the Hermann grid illusion. In the discovery of the optical illusion, Ehrenstein found that grating patterns of straight lines that stop at a certain point appear to have a brighter centre, compared to the background.

Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology". Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed. In 1967, Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms. Cognitive Psychology brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While Cognitive Psychology was considered unconventional, it was Neisser's Cognition and Reality that contained some of his most controversial ideas. A main theme in Cognition and Reality is Neisser's advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural settings. Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment. Neisser illustrated this during one of his highly publicized studies on people's memories of the Challenger explosion. In his later career, he summed up current research on human intelligence and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the Flynn effect. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suspense</span> State of mental uncertainty

Suspense is a state of anxiety or excitement caused by mysteriousness, uncertainty, doubt, or undecidedness. In a narrative work, suspense is the audience's excited anticipation about the plot or conflict, particularly as it affects a character for whom the audience feels sympathy. However, suspense is not exclusive to narratives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bluma Zeigarnik</span> Soviet psychologist (1901–1988)

Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist of Lithuanian origin, a member of the Berlin School of experimental psychology and the so-called Vygotsky Circle. She contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period.

Karl Duncker was a German Gestalt psychologist. He attended Friedrich-Wilhelms-University from 1923 to 1923, and spent 1925–1926 at Clark University in Worcester, MA as a visiting professor, where he received a master's degree in arts degree. Until 1935 he was a student and assistant of the founders of Gestalt psychology in Berlin: Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka. In 1935, exiled by the Nazis, he got an assistantship in Cambridge with Frederic Charles Bartlett and later immigrated to the US, where he was again an assistant of Wolfgang Köhler's at Swarthmore College. Duncker committed suicide in 1940 at 37 years of age. He suffered from depression for some time and had received professional treatment.

In psychology, rigidity, or mental rigidity, refers to an obstinate inability to yield or a refusal to appreciate another person's viewpoint or emotions and the tendency to perseverate, which is the inability to change habits and modify concepts and attitudes once developed.

Motivated forgetting is a theorized psychological behavior in which people may forget unwanted memories, either consciously or unconsciously. It is an example of a defence mechanism, since these are unconscious or conscious coping techniques used to reduce anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful impulses thus it can be a defence mechanism in some ways. Defence mechanisms are not to be confused with conscious coping strategies.

Interruption science is the interdisciplinary scientific study concerned with how interruptions affect human performance, and the development of interventions to ameliorate the disruption caused by interruptions. Interruption science is a branch of human factors psychology and emerged from human–computer interaction and cognitive psychology.

In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.

In psychology, the Ovsiankina effect describes the innate human urge to finish tasks previously initiated. This tendency to resume an interrupted action is especially prevalent when the action hasn't yet been achieved. The effect is named after Maria Ovsiankina, who conducted research on this behavior.

Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina (1898–1993) was a Russian-German-American psychologist. She studied what is now known as the Ovsiankina effect, a variation of the Zeigarnik effect. Ovsiankina worked in a variety of psychology jobs, including working with schizophrenia patients. She wrote books about psychological testing.

References

  1. ↑ Ovsiankina, Maria (January 1928). "Die Wiederaufnahme unterbrochener Handlungen" [Resumption of Interrupted Tasks]. Psychologische Forschung (in German). 11 (3/4): 302–379. doi:10.1007/BF00410261. S2CID   147359058. Archived from the original on 2022-02-26.
  2. ↑ Koffka, Kurt (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. p. 334ff. ISBN   978-0-415-86881-5. OCLC   2314654.
  3. ↑ Zeigarnik, Bluma (1938). "Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen" [On Finished and Unfinished Tasks](PDF). Psychologische Forschung (in German). 9: 1–85. Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 December 2021. pp. 300-314 in W. D. Ellis (Ed.), A Sourcebook of Gestalt Psychology, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
  4. 1 2 Lewin, Kurt (1935). A Dynamic Theory of Personality: Selected Papers. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. p. 243ff. ISBN   978-0-07-037451-5. OCLC   760465262.
  5. ↑ Zeigarnik, Bluma (1927). "Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen" [Remembering completed and uncompleted actions](PDF) (in German). pp. 300–314. Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 December 2021.
  6. ↑ McKinney, Fred (April 1935). "Studies in the Retention of Interrupted Learning Activities". Journal of Comparative Psychology . 19 (2): 265–296. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.66.8781 . doi:10.1037/h0056005. Archived from the original on 5 May 2019.
  7. ↑ Moore, Matt (4 October 2017). "How the NBA's newly imposed 'Harden Rule' will impact James Harden this season". CBSSports.com. Archived from the original on 6 February 2020. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  8. ↑ Boone, Kyle (September 22, 2017). "The NBA is finally cracking down on James Harden's foul-drawing antics". CBSSports.com. Archived from the original on October 5, 2017. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  9. ↑ "NBA implementing 'Zaza Pachulia,' 'James Harden' rules". NBCSports.com. September 21, 2017. Archived from the original on October 4, 2017. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  10. ↑ Einstein, Gilles O.; McDaniel, Mark A.; Williford, Carrie L.; Pagan, Jason L.; Dismukes, R. Key (2003). "Forgetting of intentions in demanding situations is rapid" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied . 9 (3): 147–162. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.5.4816 . doi:10.1037/1076-898X.9.3.147. PMID   14570509. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. [...] there is controversy regarding the reliability of the Zeigarnik effect [...]
  11. ↑ Colin M. MacLeod (6 April 2020). "Zeigarnik and von Restorff: The memory effects and the stories behind them". Memory and Cognition. doi:10.3758/S13421-020-01033-5. ISSN   0090-502X. PMID   32291585. Wikidata   Q91935831.


Further reading

Zeigarnik

Others

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.