What is the Ovsiankina effect?
The Ovsiankina effect is the tendency to go back to a task that was interrupted. A 1941 puzzle study, a 1944 review and a 2025 meta-analysis show what it covers and what it does not.
Answer to the question
What is the Ovsiankina effect?
The Ovsiankina effect is the tendency to go back to a task that was interrupted and finish it. Maria Ovsiankina reported it in 1928. A 2025 meta-analysis found that people resumed interrupted tasks about two times in three and found no memory advantage for them, which marks it off from the Zeigarnik effect.
Key takeaways
- Nowlis (1941) interrupted undergraduates on a cogwheel puzzle: after success on a second task about half went back to the puzzle, against roughly three in ten after neutral feedback and under a quarter after failure.
- Prentice (1944) treated resumption as a dependable observation and doubted that it shares one cause with better recall of interrupted tasks.
- Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) found mind-wandering reported by 65.2 per cent of students who wrote about unfinished tasks, against 33.3 per cent of those who also made a specific plan.
- Ghibellini and Meier (2025) pooled 21 publications on resumption: about 67 per cent of people went back, and the meta-analysis found no memory advantage for interrupted tasks.
Interrupt someone partway through a task and about two in three will go back to it. That pull is the Ovsiankina effect, the tendency to resume an interrupted task, named for Maria Ovsiankina, who first reported it. It belongs to the same family of experiments as the Zeigarnik effect, and it is the member of that family that has held up better when the evidence is pooled.
1941: Nine groups and one unfinished puzzle
At Yale, undergraduate men working on a cogwheel puzzle were stopped before they could finish it, then left free to go back to the puzzle or take up a jigsaw. H. H. Nowlis, who ran the study, built nine groups of 20 by crossing three kinds of feedback, success, neutral and failure, with the two tasks. The design let the study ask whether the way each task went changed how many people returned to the puzzle.
Feedback on the interrupted puzzle itself lowered the rate of returning, whether it was good news or bad, compared with a neutral interruption. Failure lowered it a little more than success did, though the gap between the two was small. The larger effect came from the other task. After success on the jigsaw, about half of the participants went back to the cogwheel puzzle. After neutral feedback the figure was nearer three in ten, and after failure it was under a quarter. Failure and neutral feedback did not differ significantly from each other, so the Ovsiankina effect in this study rose after success and did not fall after failure.
After success on the jigsaw, about half of the participants went back to the cogwheel puzzle.
Whichever task had gone well also tended to be preferred and judged easier. Nowlis explained the pattern through goal-response theory: success on a later task strengthens the drive to resume an earlier one, and failure weakens it. The paper presents that account as a hypothesis only partly tested.
1944: What an early review made of it
The original paper appeared in Psychologische Forschung, in the series of studies of action and emotion from 1920s Berlin that also carried Bluma Zeigarnik's 1927 paper on memory for finished and unfinished tasks. A critical review from 1944, by W. C. H. Prentice, described how the two findings had been read as products of one tension system, and questioned that reading. It treated the Ovsiankina effect as a dependable observation and doubted that resumption and better recall had a single cause, pointing to a children's puzzle study in which resumption and recall of completed tasks ran inversely.
The same review set out how resumption varied with a person's view of the way to the goal. Ovsiankina had found that ambitious participants went back to tasks that promised success and avoided those that promised failure. The review concluded that resumption depends on whether the path to the goal looks clear, blocked or threatening, together with the person's level of aspiration. That conclusion sits comfortably beside Nowlis's result, in which success on one task changed who went back to another.
2011: Does a delay or a plan matter?
The wait between the interruption and the chance to resume ran from one minute to fifteen in the Yale design, and it made no meaningful difference to how many went back. The Ovsiankina effect did not fade over a quarter of an hour.
A different line of work asks whether an open task can be settled without being finished. In 2011 two Florida State researchers, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister, had students write about important tasks they had not yet completed. In the first of their studies, with 69 undergraduates, mind-wandering during a later reading task was reported by 65.2 per cent of the students who had only written about their unfinished tasks, against 33.3 per cent of those who had also made a specific plan.
A later study found that listing possible actions without committing to one did not reduce the intrusions. The outcomes were intrusive thoughts, accessibility and performance, and not the rate of going back, so the result concerns the nagging of an open task, which is related to the Ovsiankina effect, and not the effect itself. The workplace version of that intrusion is covered in [Why Attention Residue Lingers at Work](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-attention-residue-lingers-at-work).
2025: Memory, action and the pooled evidence
The Zeigarnik effect is a claim about memory and the Ovsiankina effect is a claim about action, a distinction that matters whenever the research is borrowed to explain a product. Adam Alter's Irresistible turns to the Zeigarnik effect to explain why unresolved stories hold their audiences. The behaviour it describes, viewers who want the story to continue, is resumption, which is what the Ovsiankina effect names. The memory evidence is set out in the older Why We article [The Zeigarnik Effect at the Credits](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/the-zeigarnik-effect-at-the-credits).
The Zeigarnik effect is a claim about memory and the Ovsiankina effect is a claim about action.
A designer who counts on memory is counting on something the pooled evidence does not show, while one who counts on the wish to resume is counting on something it does. A cliffhanger interrupts a story, and the Ovsiankina effect predicts that many viewers will want to go back to it. The rival pull of a series that has stopped being enjoyed is a different matter, taken up in [Why You Finish the Series You Stopped Enjoying](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-you-finish-series-you-dont-enjoy).
The widest test of the Ovsiankina effect and its sister is a 2025 meta-analysis that pooled the published experiments, run by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier. Of the 59 publications covered, 38 compared recall of interrupted and finished tasks, and the pooled ratio of average recall came out at 0.99, effectively level. A further 21 measured resumption. People went back to the interrupted task about 67 per cent of the time, so roughly two in three interrupted tasks were taken up again once the chance came, and the figure was 66.79 per cent with Ovsiankina's own 1928 data left out. The meta-analysis found no memory advantage for interrupted tasks.
The pair proposed that the Zeigarnik effect may depend on the authority of the experimenter, the demands of the situation and how involved participants were, conditions more common in early laboratories than in later ones. The Ovsiankina effect they described as a general tendency.
How attractive the interrupted task was to the person doing it was related to resumption. That fits the 1944 view. The route matters.
Common questions
What is the Ovsiankina effect?
The Ovsiankina effect is the tendency to go back to a task that was interrupted and finish it. Maria Ovsiankina reported it in 1928. A 2025 meta-analysis found that people resumed interrupted tasks about two times in three.
How is the Ovsiankina effect different from the Zeigarnik effect?
The Zeigarnik effect is a claim about memory, that interrupted tasks are recalled better than finished ones. The Ovsiankina effect is a claim about action, that people return to them. The 2025 meta-analysis found no memory advantage but did find a general tendency to resume.
Does the Ovsiankina effect always happen?
No. About two in three people resumed in the pooled studies, and resumption was related to how attractive the task was. In Nowlis's 1941 study, success on a second task raised the rate of returning to the first.
Can a plan reduce the pull of an unfinished task?
Masicampo and Baumeister found in 2011 that making a specific plan reduced the intrusive thoughts an unfinished goal produced. They measured intrusions and performance, not the rate of resuming, so the finding concerns the nagging of an open task.
Sources
Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Seed book.
Ovsiankina, M. (1928). “Die Wiederaufnahme von unterbrochenen Handlungen.” Psychologische Forschung, 11, 302-379. doi:10.1007/BF00410261 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00410261
Nowlis, H. H. (1941). “The influence of success and failure on the resumption of an interrupted task.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 28(4), 304-325. doi:10.1037/h0055389 https://doi.org/10.1037/h0055389
Prentice, W. C. H. (1944). “The interruption of tasks.” Psychological Review, 51(6), 329-340. doi:10.1037/h0059614 https://doi.org/10.1037/h0059614
Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2011). “Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667-683. doi:10.1037/a0024192 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024192
Ghibellini, R., & Meier, B. (2025). “Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, article 962. doi:10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w