Serial Position Effect

The serial-position effect is the finding that people recall items from the beginning and the end of a studied list more accurately than items from the middle, a pattern the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus identified and named through his own self-conducted memory experiments. The effect is made up of two component patterns: the recency effect, in which people asked to recall a list in any order tend to start with the most recently presented items and show superior recall for them, and the primacy effect, in which, among the earlier items, those presented first are recalled more often than those presented in the middle. Researchers explain the primacy effect by proposing that the first items receive more rehearsal and cognitive processing, strengthening their storage in long-term memory, an advantage that grows when items are presented more slowly; they explain the recency effect chiefly by proposing that the most recent items remain directly accessible in working memory at the moment of recall, along with a related account holding that the current retrieval context itself serves as a cue that favors recently studied material. Items from the middle of a list benefit from neither advantage and show the weakest recall of all three positions.