Maria Ovsiankina
Maria Ovsiankina was a psychologist whose 1928 paper in Psychologische Forschung reported that people who are interrupted in a task tend to go back and finish it when they get the chance. The tendency is now called the Ovsiankina effect. A 2025 meta-analysis found it to be a general and reliable tendency, unlike the better-known Zeigarnik effect.
Who they are
Her 1928 paper appeared in Psychologische Forschung under the series title "Untersuchungen zur Handlungs- und Affektpsychologie", the same series as Bluma Zeigarnik's 1927 study of finished and unfinished tasks. This page records only what the published record states. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.
Key papers
Die Wiederaufnahme unterbrochener Handlungen (1928). The paper studied what people do after an interruption, rather than what they remember. Its finding, as summarised in the 2025 meta-analysis by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier, is that interrupted tasks tend to be resumed. Pooling 21 publications, that meta-analysis found a resumption rate of about two in three, and very nearly the same rate when Ovsiankina's own 1928 data were left out. Resumption was more likely when the interrupted task was an attractive one.
Key ideas
The Ovsiankina effect is about doing. It describes a pull to return to and complete an unfinished activity. The Zeigarnik effect, by contrast, is a claim about memory. The two are often confused in popular writing, where the pull of a cliffhanger or an unfinished level is attributed to memory. The 2025 meta-analysis supports the behavioural claim and not the memory claim, which makes Ovsiankina's finding the better explanation for why people keep going back to unfinished stories and tasks.
Later work by E. J. Masicampo and Roy F. Baumeister in 2011 suggests that the pull of an unfinished goal can be quietened by making a specific plan to finish it.
Sources
- Ovsiankina, M. (1928). Die Wiederaufnahme unterbrochener Handlungen. Psychologische Forschung, 11, 302-379. doi:10.1007/BF00410261
- Ghibellini, R., & Meier, B. (2025). Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 962. doi:10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w