According to a report published by a task force on Women in Psychology through the American Psychological Association in 2006, about 47% of candidates receiving post-baccalaureate degrees (doctoral and masters) in cognitive psychology in 2004 were women (Table 6). And although 75% of the students in graduate psychology programs are women, many barriers continue to exist in the 21st century for women, especially women from underrepresented groups. For example, using data provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2010, recently graduated doctoral-level women psychologists entering the workforce encountered lower salaries than men regardless of subfield with an average wage gap in starting salaries of almost $20,000, according to a 2017 article.
A decade later, any progress since this 2010 NSF report has been stalled thanks to the global COVID-19 pandemic. As described in a report published by the McKinsey Global Institute, the pandemic has disproportionately impacted individuals who were already susceptible to disparities across the globe. Female academics have been significantly impacted, especially if caring for school-aged children, as described in this piece about academics in Australia. Statistics, such as research productivity defined by hours conducting research or submitting manuscripts for publication, teaching workloads, and service commitments, indicate that women and non-binary academics bear a significantly higher burden of academic and home obligations. This pattern is consistent across countries world-wide and apparently has not changed since the early 1900s when women were first entering the field of psychology.
Colin MacLeod recently summarized what he had learned about the people behind two famous memory effects: the Zeigarnik Effect by Bluma Vulfovna Zeigarnik (pictured below left) and the von Restorff Effect by Hedwig Ida Auguste von Restorff (pictured below right).
Published in the Psychonomic Society journal Memory & Cognition, I was both delighted and intrigued by the notion that a male scientist would be interested in better understanding the female scientists behind these two memory phenomena. In particular, MacLeod focused on disentangling the origin of each of these two memory effects while also describing the lives and circumstances of the two women who developed and studied these memory effects. MacLeod summarized the bodies of work that each scientist ultimately influenced while illustrating their current status in the sub-discipline of memory.
Having taught introductory cognition courses over the years, I was familiar with both memory effects. I often use the Zeigarnik effect as an example of everyday experiences being a source for research ideas. The story as shared by MacLeod about the origin of the phenomenon that memory is better for incomplete tasks than complete tasks (i.e., the Zeigarnik effect) involved an observation during a restaurant visit made by her supervisor, Kurt Lewin, a prominent social psychologist influenced by Gestalt psychology. Lewin noticed that the waiter could remember each member’s orders and tally the total bill, but once the ticket closed, the waiter no longer had any recollection of the details.
Zeigarnik took this everyday observation and extended it to task performance for her dissertation. She created a series of studies in which she tested memories for various activities that were either interrupted or not under many different conditions, including immediate recall, delayed recall, context changes, etc. Although much of her work supported the notion that interrupted tasks created a recall advantage over completed tasks, conflicting results have emerged over time, including difficulty replicating her various studies. One explanation for the lack of replication is the oft-neglected role of individual differences in motivation. According to MacLeod’s review of the current literature, the Zeigarnik effect, or the interrupted task paradigm, is now primarily ignored by today’s memory researchers as it has failed to contribute significantly to refining our understanding of the constraints of memory recall.
Another memory phenomenon is the von Restorff effect. As described by MacLeod, Hedwig von Restorff was also influenced by Gestalt psychology through her mentor, Wolfgang Köhler, a prominent Gestalt psychologist interested in comparative psychology. Inspired by the relationship between figure and ground, the von Restorff effect states that an isolate or unique stimulus is more easily remembered than its surrounding context or phenomenal field.
Like Zeigarnik, von Restorff tested her ideas about the significant impact of the isolate on memory by focusing on the salience of various stimuli using a series of experiments. Through her experiments, von Restorff manipulated a number of different variables, ranging from the type of stimuli used to the position of the isolate in the non-isolates to the response task used (i.e., recognition or recall). Ultimately, von Restorff’s experiments supported the conclusion that stimuli presented as isolation are remembered better than stimuli presented as a whole or “monotonous mass.” Unlike the Zeigarnik effect, the von Restorff memory effect “remains one of the best known phenomena in the entire memory literature” and has continued to inspire researchers today such that the underlying neural mechanisms are now being elucidated.
Like many female psychologists today, Zeigarnik and von Restorff ultimately pursued clinical fields. Zeigarnik shifted from her dissertation topic of the influence of an unexpected event on memory and pursued two additional doctoral degrees over various aspects of psychopathology. Similarly, von Restorff also completed a dissertation on the influence of unexpected events but left the field to become a family physician. Unwittingly, these two women attended the same graduate institution approximately six years apart, having both been influenced by Gestalt psychologists.
Intriguing to me are the parallels between their lives 85 years ago and the lives of women today. As members of underrepresented groups (e.g., religious and gender) in male-dominated fields, Zeigarnik, who was raised in a Jewish family, and von Restorff developed their professional lives during a highly politically unstable period while trying to raise and protect their families from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, respectively. Despite their personal difficulties, both women forged new paths for women to pursue careers in psychology, medicine, and academia. And although von Restorff’s ideas have been sustained over eight decades whereas Zeigarnik’s have not, MacLeod’s narrative of their stories reminds us that anything is possible. And we, too, will persevere.
The Psychonomic Society article focused on in this post:
MacLeod, C. M. (2020). Zeigarnik and von Restorff: The memory effects and the stories behind them. Memory & Cognition, 48, 1073–1088. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01033-5
