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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 …