Romain Ghibellini

Who they are

The University of Bern is the affiliation given for Ghibellini on the 2025 paper. 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 Meier. The authors gathered 59 publications. Of these, 38 compared memory for interrupted and completed tasks, and 21 measured whether people resumed interrupted tasks. Compared directly, average recall of interrupted and completed tasks came out level, with or without Bluma Zeigarnik's own 1927 data. Of all the tasks people recalled, just under half were interrupted ones. On resumption, people went back to interrupted tasks about two times in three, and more often when the task was attractive. The abstract states: "We found no memory advantage for unfinished tasks but found a general tendency to resume tasks."

Key ideas

The paper separates two ideas that are often run together. The Zeigarnik effect is a claim about memory, that unfinished tasks are recalled better. The Ovsiankina effect is a claim about behaviour, that people tend to go back and finish what was interrupted. The authors conclude that the second "represents a general tendency, whereas the Zeigarnik effect lacks universal validity."

They also offer an explanation for the old result. Zeigarnik's experiments may have depended on conditions more common in the 1920s, including the authority of the experimenter and how absorbed participants were in their tasks. They note that task involvement "has become more difficult as we are increasingly faced with interruptions."

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