Bluma Zeigarnik
Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik (Template:Lang-ru) (9 November 1901 − 24 February 1988) was a Soviet psychologist and psychiatrist, a member of Berlin School of experimental psychology and Vygotsky Circle. Discovered the so-called Zeigarnik effect and contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the after-WWII period.
Life and career
Born into a Jewish family in Prienai, Zeigarnik matriculated from the Berlin University in 1927. She described the Zeigarnik effect in a diploma prepared under the supervision of Kurt Lewin. In the 1930s, she worked with Lev Vygotsky at the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (AUIEM, aka VIEM). During World War II, she assisted Alexander Luria in repairing head injuries. She was a co-founder of the Moscow State University Department of Psychology and the All-Russian Seminars in Psychopathology. She died in Moscow at the age of 87.
The Zeigranik Effect
In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik first studied the phenomenon after her professor, Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, noticed that a waiter had better recollections of still unpaid orders.
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.
The Zeigarnik effect suggests that students who suspend their study, 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).
References
- Template:Ru icon Biography of Zeigarnik on the website of the MSU Department of Psychology
- A.V. Zeigarnik, "Bluma Zeigarnik: A Memoir" in Gestalt Theory (2007), no 3, pp. 256-268.
- Yasnitsky, A. (2011). Vygotsky Circle as a Personal Network of Scholars: Restoring Connections Between People and Ideas. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, DOI: 10.1007/s12124-011-9168-5 pdf