Suspense - Zeigarnik Effect

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition. Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (1900-1988) first studied the phenomenon after her professor, Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, noticed that a waiter had better recollections of still unpaid orders. However, several thorough replication studies done later in other countries failed to replicate Zeigarnik's results. In those studies no significant recall effects were found for completed and interrupted tasks (e.g., Van Bergen, A., 1968. For a review see Kiebel, Elizabeth M., 2009 ).

The Zeigarnik effect suggests that students who suspend their studying, during which they do unrelated activities (such as studying unrelated subjects or playing games), will remember material better than students who complete study sessions without a break (Zeigarnik, 1927; McKinney 1935).

It is a type of memory bias.