Our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list is called the __________ effect.
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Problem summaryWe have a tendency to recall the first and the last items in a series best Example▲ The recency effect disappears when people think about other matters for thirty seconds after the last item in the list is presented. Usage
 This card is part of the Persuasive Patterns printed card deckThe Persuasive Patterns Card Deck is a collection of 60 design patterns driven by psychology, presented in a manner easily referenced and used as a brainstorming tool. Get your deck! SolutionHow do you order list items? Present important items at the beginning and end of a list to maximize recall and the likelihood that users will remember those items when the time comes to make a decision. Initial items are remembered more efficiently than items later in a list. Items at the end of a list are recalled more easily immediately after their presentation. Concretely, you will want to:
RationaleWhen recalling items from a list, items at the beginning and the end are better recalled than the items in the middle. Our ability to better recall items at the beginning of a list is called the primacy effect, whereas our ability to recall items at the end of a list is called a recency effect.
DiscussionPresenting long lists of information to users, significantly strains our limited resources and restricted memory systems – especially short-term memory, where only three or four items or chunks of information can be maintained at one time. Our ability to recall previously presented items is also severely impacted by events between initial processing and later recall. User Interface Design PatternsPersuasive Design PatternsThe primacy and recency effect (the tendency to remember words at the beginning and ends of lists) is evidence in support of the MSM. The following has been adapted from IB Psychology: A Student’s Guide Evidence for MSM: Serial position effect (primacy and recency effects)The serial position effect (aka primacy and recency effect) is a cognitive phenomenon whereby people tend to remember the first (primacy) and last (recency) items in a series. This provides evidence for the MSM: people tend to remember the first items because they have longer to rehearse the information and they may have paid more attention to it, so it has a higher probability of being transferred to the LTS. They tend to remember the most recent information because it is still in their STS. Information in the middle may be lost because of the limited capacity of the STS. This can be shown in Glanzer and Cunitz’s famous study. A common method used to investigate memory is using free recall. This is when participants are exposed to a list of words (e.g. listening to a tape recording of words read out) and they are then asked to write down in any order (free) as many words as they can remember (recall). Using this method, researchers detected a pattern: participants can remember words better when they appear at the beginning of a list and at the end of a list. This has been dubbed the serial position effect (aka the primacy and recency effects). Glanzer and Cunitz proposed that this was because the memories were coming from two different stores – the STS and the LTS. In order to demonstrate this, they conducted a series of experiments involving memory tests. One of these experiments used 46 enlisted army men who were shown word monosyllabic words from the Thorndike-Lorge list on a screen using a projector. The experimenter read the words as they appeared also. The researchers used a repeated measures design by testing subjects individually and randomly assigning the word lists to one of the three conditions. The three conditions were:
Like Peterson and Peterson’s study, participants had a distraction task during the delay and had to count backwards in 3s to prevent further rehearsal. The results showed that when there was no delay in recall (IFR) the primacy and recency effect was demonstrated as per usual. (Re-read above to see how this supports the MSM). However, in the DFR-30 group only the primacy effect was present and the longer the delay, the more reduced was the recency effect (see graph below). This is further support for the MSM because it shows that the rehearsal has not changed the transfer to the LTS (because the primacy effect still exists), but the recency effect has gone because there was no time for rehearsal (because of the distraction task) and the 30 second delay was longer than the short-term stores capacity so the memories decayed (were lost). You can see that as the delay increases, the recency effect disappears but the primacy effect remains. This provides further support for the MSM as it shows the duration of the STS is limited and that information rehearsed can be transferred to the LTS. It’s interesting to note that these experiments were conducted before Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed the MSM, so these experiments may have inspired the theory, not the other way around. References Glanzer, Murray, and Anita R. Cunitz. “Two Storage Mechanisms in Free Recall.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 5.4 (1966): 351-60. Web. (Link to full study)
Travis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator. Which Effect refers to the tendency to remember the first item on a list?In simplest terms, the primacy effect refers to the tendency to recall information presented at the start of a list better than information at the middle or end. This is a cognitive bias that is believed to relate to the tendency to rehearse and relate memory storage systems.
Is the tendency to recall the items?The recency effect is the tendency to remember the most recently presented information best. For example, if you are trying to memorize a list of items, the recency effect means you are more likely to recall the items from the list that you studied last.
What is primacy and recency effect with example?Memorizing a list of words is like running a marathon. There is the beginning, a very long middle that blurs together, and now it is the end. The primacy effect is the beginning; you remember it because that is where you started. The recency effect is the finish; you remember the end the best.
What effect describes a memory effect that we encode the first and last items in a list better?Ebbinghaus found that he could more easily remember the words that were at the beginning and end of the list compared to the words in the middle of the list. Ebbinghaus realized that the position of an item in a list did impact how well it was remembered and named this cognitive function the serial position effect.
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