W. C. H. Prentice

Who they are

The review is the work recorded here. This page records only what the published paper states. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

The interruption of tasks (1944). The paper is a review, not a new experiment on resumption. It draws on earlier studies and on the author's own unpublished preliminary work, which concerned recall. It describes the tendency to resume an interrupted task as a dependable and largely predictable phenomenon, citing Ovsiankina's 1928 study as the source.

The review sets out how the Berlin school of researchers had read resumption and enhanced recall of interrupted tasks as two products of the same tension system. Prentice questions that link. He points to a study of children and jigsaw puzzles in which children who resumed interrupted puzzles recalled completed puzzles better, an inverse relation between resumption and recall that the standard account did not predict.

The review also covers the part played by success and failure. Ovsiankina had found that ambitious participants resumed tasks that promised success and avoided tasks that promised failure. A study of children reported that the preference for resuming failed tasks grew with age. A study of task preference found that many participants raised their liking for a task after failing it, and that some seemed to want to erase the failure by succeeding later. Anticipating failure lowered a task's attractiveness more than actually failing it did.

Key ideas

Prentice concluded that resumption depends on how participants perceive the route to their goal, whether it seems clear, blocked or threatening, and on their level of aspiration. On that view, resumption and recall may reflect different psychological forces and need not be explained by a single tension.

The same line of thought runs through H. H. Nowlis's 1941 experiment, in which the rate of returning to an interrupted cogwheel puzzle changed with the feedback participants received on a second task. A 2025 meta-analysis by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier later found no memory advantage for interrupted tasks across 38 publications and a resumption rate of about two in three across 21 publications, which is consistent with treating resumption and recall as separate questions.

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