The spontaneous prioritization of “unfinishedness” in perception: A visual Zeigarnik effect.

Abstract

The events that occupy our thoughts in an especially persistent way are often those that are unfinished-from half-written papers to unfolded laundry. These events seem to also be privileged in memory, as in the "Zeigarnik effect": When people carry out various tasks, but some are never finished due to extrinsic interruptions, memory tends to be better for those tasks that were unfinished. But just how foundational is this sort of "unfinishedness" in mental life? The Zeigarnik effect is often explained by appeal to the salience of goals or the weight of obligation, but might unfinishedness also be spontaneously prioritized even in visual processing-independent of these high-level social/motivational factors? Across four experiments (N = 120), observers viewed paths that gradually unfolded through mazes, from a start point to an end point. Probes briefly appeared along the path, and observers later simply reproduced their positions. Critically, each path either reached its end point or stopped shortly before-remaining visually unfinished. Although this manipulation was entirely task-irrelevant, it greatly influenced performance-with more precise reproductions on unfinished trials. This same pattern held across multiple experiments, even while carefully controlling for various lower level visual properties, and it generalized across different types of displays. This new visual Zeigarnik effect shows how vision extracts an unexpectedly rich property that is usually associated with higher level thought, and how the unfinishedness of events is privileged in the mind at a deep level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).