Beat Meier

Who they are

The University of Bern is the affiliation given for Meier on the 2025 paper. The university's pages list him as an associate professor in Cognitive Psychology, Perception and Research Methods at the Institute of Psychology. This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects (2025), with Ghibellini. A meta-analysis is a study that pools the results of earlier studies. This one covered 59 publications. Across the 38 that tested memory, average recall of interrupted and completed tasks was level, whether or not Bluma Zeigarnik's original 1927 data were included. Across the 21 that tested resumption, people returned to interrupted tasks about two times in three. The authors describe Zeigarnik's original values as "inflated" against the pooled evidence and warn that her ratio measure is easily swayed by a few extreme scores.

Key ideas

The central idea of the paper is that the famous memory effect and the less famous resumption effect should be kept apart. People do tend to go back to what they were interrupted in, and that tendency is stronger when the task is attractive. They do not, on the pooled evidence, remember interrupted tasks better than finished ones.

That distinction matters for how the Zeigarnik effect is used in popular writing about television, games and apps. Designs that rely on an unfinished story or task are better explained by the urge to resume than by any special place the unfinished thing holds in memory.

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