H. H. Nowlis

Who they are

The paper gives Yale University as the setting of the work and lists its author as H. H. Nowlis. This page records only what the published paper states. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

The influence of success and failure on the resumption of an interrupted task (1941). The study used the interrupted-task method. A participant was pulled away from a main task, a cogwheel puzzle, before finishing it, and was then offered a second task, a jigsaw puzzle, alongside the chance to return. The participants were male undergraduates. Nowlis crossed three kinds of feedback, success, neutral and failure, on each of the two tasks, which gave nine groups of 20 participants.

Feedback on the interrupted puzzle itself, whether it was success or failure, reduced the rate of resumption compared with a neutral interruption, and failure reduced it slightly more than success did. The difference between the two was small. The larger effect came from feedback on the second task. Combined across groups, resumption was about 52 per cent after success on the second task, about 28 per cent after neutral feedback and about 23 per cent after failure. Failure and neutral feedback did not differ significantly from each other.

Participants also tended to prefer, and to judge easier, whichever task had received success feedback. The paper reports that a wait of between one and fifteen minutes before the chance to resume made no meaningful difference to how many participants went back.

Key ideas

Nowlis interpreted the pattern through goal-response theory. In that account, success on a later task strengthens the drive to resume an earlier one, while failure on the later task weakens it. The paper presents this as a hypothesis that the experiment tested only in part.

The experiment is a useful reference point for a point that W. C. H. Prentice made in his 1944 review of research on interrupted tasks: whether people resume depends on how the path to the goal looks to them, and not only on the fact of the interruption. In Nowlis's design, the same interrupted puzzle was resumed at different rates depending on how a different task had gone. Prentice's review is the later of the two and is described on his page on this site.

Maria Ovsiankina's 1928 paper, which gave the effect its name, studied resumption in the Berlin series of experiments on action and emotion. Nowlis's study sits in the line of work that followed, asking what raises or lowers the tendency to go back. A 2025 meta-analysis by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier, covering 21 publications on resumption, found that people went back to interrupted tasks about two times in three and that resumption was related to how attractive the task was.

---