Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Minnesota, discovered in experiments that when people switch tasks, attention doesn't immediately follow. Part of the attention remains stuck on the prior task, resulting in worse performance on the next task. She called this effect attention residue, which becomes stronger in these instances:

Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do

Our mind can do certain kinds of things, in a highly creative way, that still surpass anything the most powerful computer can do. Its ability to integrate an almost infinite set of variables in any situation is uncanny. Give it a problem or a project on which to focus, and the amount of complexity it can absorb and creativity it can produce are

The greatest recall occurred for details of ads that the researchers stopped five to six seconds before their natural endings. What’s more, better memory for specifics of the unfinished ads was evident immediately, two days later, and (especially) two weeks later, demonstrating the holding power that a lack of closure possesses.

tarefas inacabadas são as que mais retemos na memória, pois elas se apropriam de nossa atenção para que possam ser realizadas e concluídas com sucesso. Uma vez completadas, os recursos da atenção antes mobilizados para resolvê-las são desviados para outros propósitos. Mas, enquanto a atividade inicial está em andamento, um nível maior de foco