Week 11: Reflection and Link

I decided to do some additional exploration of the zeigarnik effect after our wrap-up discussion of cognitive psychology and this phenomenon in particular this past week. As you'll recall from the reading, this effect was coined by the Russian psychologist B. Zeigarnik, who claimed that the recall ratio for tasks interrupted in the middle or toward the end is higher than those interrupted early on. Additional research since this time has shown that this effect is more likely to appear if the subject is ego-involved in the task in some way. In addition, studies have shown that individuals with a genuine level of aspiration to complete the task are also more likely to show the zeigarnik effect than other participants.

Apparently musicians like to utilize this phenomenon when composing "hooks," or for the conclusion of pieces. Being rather non-musically inclined, I'm not entirely sure I understand how this works, but in essence, it involes a suspended chord that created initial dissonance and is then resolved by the final note. Check it out here: http://elearningcurve.blogspot.com/2008/07/learning-zeigarnik-effect.html. This article claims the effect can be heard at the end of the Beatles' She's Leaving Home.

Interestingly enough, there seems to be a dearth of information on Bluma Zeigarnik beyond short descriptions of her work under Kurt Lewin and subsequent discovery of the phenomenon later named after her. The only other credit I could find to her was her presence in helping to establish experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline. Also, am I the only one that didn't realize Zeigarnik was a woman? Is this due to the tendency to just call scientists by their first intitial/last name, or does it say something more about our tendency to assume important, noted discoveries were made by men? It's interesting to think about the number of men we've studied in this course versus the number of women...