Percieving "Unfinishedness"
For many of us, few things are more satisfying than finishing tasks. And the flip-side of this is that unfinished tasks are often especially salient — as in half-written papers, half-completed crossword puzzles, or interrupted dinner preparations. These items tend to preoccupy our thoughts in a persistent (and sometimes even frustrating) way, which seems specific to unfinishedness: the not-yet-started puzzle (or dinner) seems of little concern, and once completed, the puzzle/dinner is often already on its way to being forgotten — but when half-completed, such things tend to be especially mentally prominent.
This phenomenon was first explored empirically in the 1930s, under the heading of the “Zeigarnik effect” (Zeigarnik, 1938). Subjects were instructed to complete various tasks, but were interrupted by an experimenter and kept from completing some of them. Afterwards, subjects were asked to recall as many of the tasks as they could, and those left unfinished were more likely to be remembered.
But is unfinishedness perhaps more foundational, such that it is rooted in visual processing itself? We believe so! Take a look at the following video, and see if you can feel the frustration of unfinishedness for yourself! This line of work explores such stimuli empirically, and to foreshadow, we find memory effects due to unfinishedness -- even when the unfinishedness in the scene is completely irrelevant to the memory task itself.
RELEVANT PRESENTATIONS
Ongchoco, J. D. K., Wong, K. W., & Scholl, B. J. (2023). The "unfinishedness" of dynamic events is spontaneously extracted in visual processing: A new 'Visual Zeigarnik Effect'. Talk presented at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/23/23, St. Pete Beach, FL.
[Show abstract]
The events that occupy our thoughts in an especially persistent way are often those that are unfinished -- half-written papers, unfolded laundry, and items not yet crossed off from to-do lists. And this factor has also been emphasized in work within higher-level cognition, 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? Might such unfinishedness be spontaneously extracted and prioritized even in lower-level visual processing? To explore this, we had observers watch animations in which a dot moved through a maze, starting at one disc (the 'startpoint') and moving toward another disc (the 'endpoint'). We tested the fidelity of visual memory by having probes (colored squares) appear briefly along the dot's path; after the dot finished moving, observers simply had to indicate where the probes had appeared. On 'Completed' trials, the motion ended when the dot reached the endpoint, but on 'Unfinished' trials, the motion ended shortly before the dot reached the endpoint. Although this manipulation was entirely task-irrelevant, it nevertheless had a powerful influence on visual memory: observers placed probes much closer to their correct locations on Unfinished trials. This same pattern held across several different experiments, even while carefully controlling for various lower-level properties of the displays (such as the speed and duration of the dot's motion). And the effect also generalized across different types of displays (e.g. also replicating when the moving dot left a visible trace). This new type of Visual Zeigarnik Effect suggests that the unfinishedness of events is not just a matter of higher-level thought and motivation, but can also be extracted as a part of visual perception itself.