RESEARCH STARTER

Recency effects

Recency effects refer to the cognitive phenomenon where individuals tend to remember items or events that occur at the end of a sequence more clearly than those in the middle. This contrasts with primacy effects, where initial items are more easily recalled. Recency effects are commonly observed in various contexts, including memory recall tasks, hiring processes, and consumer behavior. For instance, when people are presented with a list, they are more likely to remember the last few items, which can also influence choices in online searches, advertising, and even food preferences.

The underlying mechanisms involve two types of memory storage: short-term (or working) memory, which temporarily holds information for immediate use, and long-term memory, where information is permanently stored. While traditional models suggested that recency effects arise from the availability of recent information in short-term memory, emerging research indicates that these effects can persist even without short-term memory involvement, indicating distinct properties of recency in long-term memory.

Understanding recency effects can have practical implications in areas such as marketing strategies, job recruitment, and performance judging, where the order of presentation can significantly influence perception and decision-making. Individuals and organizations can benefit from this knowledge by strategically positioning key information to enhance recall and preference.

Full Article

  • TYPES OF PSYCHOLOGY: cognitive, consumer, educational, social, testing and measurement

The position (or order) of items in a list affects everything, from the results people are likely to click on during a web search to the brands remembered after a series of commercials. When presented with a series of items, people are most likely to recall those that appear at the beginning and the end but forget items in the middle. The tendency to remember items at the end of a list is known as the recency effect.

Introduction: What Are Recency Effects?

Generally speaking, people tend to remember events that happen at the beginning or end of a series better than those in the middle. The tendency for people to remember things that appear at the beginning of a series is referred to as "primacy effects." The tendency to remember things that appear at the end of a series is known as "recency effects." When given a list of words or items to remember, experimental participants in the laboratory will largely remember items that appeared at the beginning of the list and items that appeared at the end of the list. This phenomenon has also been demonstrated in the real world in a variety of circumstances, including hiring and talent acquisition, performance judging, and even food preferences.

What Causes Recency Effects?

It is widely held that memory has two storage resources. One of these resources is permanent and is often called "long-term memory." This is where all permanently retained information is stored. This permanent store contains episodic memory, or memory for life events; semantic memory, which is memory for the meanings of things, and procedural memory, or memory for how to do things like driving a car. The second memory resource is not permanent but a temporary storage mechanism. It is essentially a working buffer used to hold information that may be imminently needed for some task or function. Incoming information first enters the working memory, or short-term store. After use in the short-term buffer, the information is either passed to the permanent long-term store or is lost (i.e., forgotten).

The conventional thinking for a long period was that recency effects occurred because people had fairly easy access to the last few items in a series. In theory, the information was more likely to still be retained in one's working memory. While there, it is readily available for recall when a memory test is taken immediately after the series of items. However, some evidence suggests that this is not the case. Indeed, long-term recency effects have been found when there was no possibility for a short-term memory buffer to have contributed information to the recall process. In fact, evidence has shown that there may be different properties for recency effects that happen in the short term and those that happen in the long term.

Why Do Recency Effects Matter? Search and Online Behavior

A common strategy among modern businesses is optimizing their placement in digital search results or platform listings. For example, on food delivery apps like Uber Eats or DoorDash, restaurants will often pay for promoted placement or optimize their keywords so they appear at the top of the list when a customer searches for “pizza” or “sushi.” Similarly, in online marketplaces like Amazon, sellers compete for top search result positions, knowing that consumers are more likely to choose an item that appears in one of the first few spots. These are examples of the primacy effect—the idea that people tend to pay more attention to and recall the first items they see. Some research has shown that when users are presented with a list of five to seven options, they often click on the last item nearly as often as the second or third. This may be because it is closest to their cursor or mentally "stands out" due to its position at the end.

Television Advertising

With the rise of on-demand content, streaming services, and mobile video platforms, television viewers became increasingly less tolerant of commercials. However, there remained one notable exception: the Super Bowl. During its annual broadcast, commercials remained a major attraction, with some viewers watching primarily to see the ads. Millions of Americans continued to watch the Super Bowl each year, and advertisers continued to pay the network airing their advertisement millions of dollars for short spots. Super Bowl ads that appeared near the beginning of the broadcast and at the start of a segment of commercials were far more likely to have their brands recognized. However, recency effects may be more likely to determine which brands viewers recall during normal viewing patterns. Regular TV viewers tend to engage in a strategy of avoiding commercial advertising. This leads them to change channels, engage in conversation, and leave the room once commercials have begun. Furthermore, those who disengage, physically or otherwise, when a commercial segment appears also return just before the show's continuation. They are, therefore, only exposed to advertising that appears when they return at the end of a commercial break. When they do recall brands, they are for products and services for which the advertisements appeared near the end of a commercial break. Therefore, because of the positioning of commercials concerning one another, those that appear last in this age of lower ad tolerance are better remembered. The casual viewer can easily observe that networks have caught on to this tendency and tend to place nonproduct, nonbrand network commercials for new shows and other network events at the end of an advertising segment.

Judgments of Preference

Food choices. Those measuring food choices have long known the benefit of placing one option in the first position; the first food sample is usually most memorable because it is experienced most strongly. However, other findings have shown that enjoyment of food that appears near the end of a meal when one is satisfied interferes with memories of the initial moments of food consumption. Not only does the memory for the end moments interfere with the initial experience, but these end moments are also more likely to determine when a particular food is consumed once again. That is, if a satisfying meal ends with a delicious cherry pie, consumers are more likely to remember the dessert portion and are more likely to have cherry pie again soon. Other researchers have found strong recency effects for preferences during a random series of wines during tasting. That is, when sequences of four and five wines were presented, tasters were more likely to rate those that appeared near the end favorably. Primacy effects for the wines were found for both high-knowledge and low-knowledge tasters. However, only high-knowledge wine tasters demonstrated a recency effect in this preference. The researchers suggested this may be because those with extensive experience at wine tasting may have been using a more rigorous strategy of comparing each wine to the one they had recently deemed as their favorite (usually the one tasted first) and then updating as they proceeded through the sequence of flavors. The recency effect they thus attribute to high-knowledge tasters being more persistent about finding a better wine. Compared to the low-knowledge tasters, they were more willing and able to expend the extra effort to search for a better wine because of their greater expertise.

Judging Sports. Recency effects also appear in sports, mainly where subjective judgment rather than objective timing determines outcomes. For example, in the Olympic Games, swimming, track, and bobsledding are decided by the clock, while gymnastics, snowboarding, and figure skating rely on judges' evaluations. Some argue that “clock sports” offer a more objective, fair playing field, as outcomes of judged events are susceptible to variability in perception, mood, or performance comparison throughout a long day—in judged competitions, the order of performance can subtly influence scores. Athletes performing early may be forgotten or judged more harshly, while those competing later may benefit from more lenient or favorable comparisons—an outcome often attributed to the recency effect,

International figure skating and synchronized diving organizers are presumably aware of this possibility and account for judging differences across a series of competitors by randomizing the order of participant appearance. Contestants are judged over two rounds with a performance near the end of the second round being awarded to those with better scores in the first round. Despite this, recency effects persist; competitors who perform later in the day, near the end of the first round, tend to receive better scores in the first and final rounds. This is troubling, as contestant fate seems in the hands of chance. However, the reality is that when judging a serially occurring sequence of performances, judges can only compare the most recent performance to any one that preceded it but cannot compare to any performance that occur afterward. Recency effects, it seems, are a necessary artifact of certain types of performance and competition.

Finances and Employment. Recency effects can also have serious consequences for employment and financial investments. In terms of employment, primacy and recency effects can influence which job candidates a hiring manager remembers best as well as their first and last impressions of a candidate. Consequently, hiring managers and human resources personnel must use alternative strategies to ensure fairer, less biased hiring decisions, such as spacing interviews more widely or rotating the order in which candidates meet with interviewers.

Conclusion

The order that things appear affects everything from whether people will remember them to how well or poorly they are rated. There are several things that individuals can do to increase their odds when something important is at stake. During a job interview or other performance rating, present the most favorable information near the end. It is more likely to take precedence as the last thing the other party remembers. This is also the case for any presentation and possibly evidence during legal proceedings. When studying information or memorizing data, placing the most essential portions at the beginning or end of the list and/or the beginning or end of the study period may be beneficial. If judging a series of choices involving preference, putting the choice you are least likely to prefer at the beginning or end ensures it has the best chance of being judged fairly; making pairwise comparisons between items rather than judging every subsequent item based on the first may also improve subjectivity. In judging formal competition, viewing a series of contestants over a longer period so that smaller groups can be judged may limit the influence of the recency effect. Another strategy is having a pool of judges who rotate in and out so that for each competitor, many judges do not compare their performance to that of every contestant who precedes them.


Bibliography

Cherry, Kendra. “The Recency Effect in Psychology.” Verywell Mind, 18 Mar. 2026, www.verywellmind.com/the-recency-effect-4685058. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Garbinsky, Emily N., et al. “Interference of the End: Why Recency Bias in Memory Determines When a Food Is Consumed Again.” Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 8, 2014, pp. 1466–74, doi:10.1177/0956797614534268. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Kramer, Robin S. S. “Sequential Effects in Olympic Synchronized Diving Scores.” Royal Society Open Science, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, article 160812, doi:10.1098/rsos.160812. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Li, C. “Primacy Effect or Recency Effect? A Long-Term Memory Test of the 2006 Super Bowl Commercials.” Proceedings of the 2007 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference, Springer, 2015. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-11806-2_4. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Mantonakis, Antonia, et al. “Order in Choice: Effects of Serial Position on Preferences.” Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 11, 2009, pp. 1309–21, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02453.x. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Murphy, Jamie, et al. “Primacy and Recency Effects on Clicking Behavior.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 522–35. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00025.x. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Ritholtz, Barry. “Confusing What Just Happened with What Happens Next.” Bloomberg, 4 Aug. 2015, www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-08-04/what-just-happened-versus-what-happens-next. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Rock, David, et al. “Behind the Clicks: Can Amazon Allocate User Attention as It Pleases?” Information Economics and Policy, vol. 69, 2024, doi:10.1016/j.infoecopol.2024.101115.

Full Article

  • TYPES OF PSYCHOLOGY: cognitive, consumer, educational, social, testing and measurement

The position (or order) of items in a list affects everything, from the results people are likely to click on during a web search to the brands remembered after a series of commercials. When presented with a series of items, people are most likely to recall those that appear at the beginning and the end but forget items in the middle. The tendency to remember items at the end of a list is known as the recency effect.

Introduction: What Are Recency Effects?

Generally speaking, people tend to remember events that happen at the beginning or end of a series better than those in the middle. The tendency for people to remember things that appear at the beginning of a series is referred to as "primacy effects." The tendency to remember things that appear at the end of a series is known as "recency effects." When given a list of words or items to remember, experimental participants in the laboratory will largely remember items that appeared at the beginning of the list and items that appeared at the end of the list. This phenomenon has also been demonstrated in the real world in a variety of circumstances, including hiring and talent acquisition, performance judging, and even food preferences.

What Causes Recency Effects?

It is widely held that memory has two storage resources. One of these resources is permanent and is often called "long-term memory." This is where all permanently retained information is stored. This permanent store contains episodic memory, or memory for life events; semantic memory, which is memory for the meanings of things, and procedural memory, or memory for how to do things like driving a car. The second memory resource is not permanent but a temporary storage mechanism. It is essentially a working buffer used to hold information that may be imminently needed for some task or function. Incoming information first enters the working memory, or short-term store. After use in the short-term buffer, the information is either passed to the permanent long-term store or is lost (i.e., forgotten).

The conventional thinking for a long period was that recency effects occurred because people had fairly easy access to the last few items in a series. In theory, the information was more likely to still be retained in one's working memory. While there, it is readily available for recall when a memory test is taken immediately after the series of items. However, some evidence suggests that this is not the case. Indeed, long-term recency effects have been found when there was no possibility for a short-term memory buffer to have contributed information to the recall process. In fact, evidence has shown that there may be different properties for recency effects that happen in the short term and those that happen in the long term.

Why Do Recency Effects Matter? Search and Online Behavior

A common strategy among modern businesses is optimizing their placement in digital search results or platform listings. For example, on food delivery apps like Uber Eats or DoorDash, restaurants will often pay for promoted placement or optimize their keywords so they appear at the top of the list when a customer searches for “pizza” or “sushi.” Similarly, in online marketplaces like Amazon, sellers compete for top search result positions, knowing that consumers are more likely to choose an item that appears in one of the first few spots. These are examples of the primacy effect—the idea that people tend to pay more attention to and recall the first items they see. Some research has shown that when users are presented with a list of five to seven options, they often click on the last item nearly as often as the second or third. This may be because it is closest to their cursor or mentally "stands out" due to its position at the end.

Television Advertising

With the rise of on-demand content, streaming services, and mobile video platforms, television viewers became increasingly less tolerant of commercials. However, there remained one notable exception: the Super Bowl. During its annual broadcast, commercials remained a major attraction, with some viewers watching primarily to see the ads. Millions of Americans continued to watch the Super Bowl each year, and advertisers continued to pay the network airing their advertisement millions of dollars for short spots. Super Bowl ads that appeared near the beginning of the broadcast and at the start of a segment of commercials were far more likely to have their brands recognized. However, recency effects may be more likely to determine which brands viewers recall during normal viewing patterns. Regular TV viewers tend to engage in a strategy of avoiding commercial advertising. This leads them to change channels, engage in conversation, and leave the room once commercials have begun. Furthermore, those who disengage, physically or otherwise, when a commercial segment appears also return just before the show's continuation. They are, therefore, only exposed to advertising that appears when they return at the end of a commercial break. When they do recall brands, they are for products and services for which the advertisements appeared near the end of a commercial break. Therefore, because of the positioning of commercials concerning one another, those that appear last in this age of lower ad tolerance are better remembered. The casual viewer can easily observe that networks have caught on to this tendency and tend to place nonproduct, nonbrand network commercials for new shows and other network events at the end of an advertising segment.

Judgments of Preference

Food choices. Those measuring food choices have long known the benefit of placing one option in the first position; the first food sample is usually most memorable because it is experienced most strongly. However, other findings have shown that enjoyment of food that appears near the end of a meal when one is satisfied interferes with memories of the initial moments of food consumption. Not only does the memory for the end moments interfere with the initial experience, but these end moments are also more likely to determine when a particular food is consumed once again. That is, if a satisfying meal ends with a delicious cherry pie, consumers are more likely to remember the dessert portion and are more likely to have cherry pie again soon. Other researchers have found strong recency effects for preferences during a random series of wines during tasting. That is, when sequences of four and five wines were presented, tasters were more likely to rate those that appeared near the end favorably. Primacy effects for the wines were found for both high-knowledge and low-knowledge tasters. However, only high-knowledge wine tasters demonstrated a recency effect in this preference. The researchers suggested this may be because those with extensive experience at wine tasting may have been using a more rigorous strategy of comparing each wine to the one they had recently deemed as their favorite (usually the one tasted first) and then updating as they proceeded through the sequence of flavors. The recency effect they thus attribute to high-knowledge tasters being more persistent about finding a better wine. Compared to the low-knowledge tasters, they were more willing and able to expend the extra effort to search for a better wine because of their greater expertise.

Judging Sports. Recency effects also appear in sports, mainly where subjective judgment rather than objective timing determines outcomes. For example, in the Olympic Games, swimming, track, and bobsledding are decided by the clock, while gymnastics, snowboarding, and figure skating rely on judges' evaluations. Some argue that “clock sports” offer a more objective, fair playing field, as outcomes of judged events are susceptible to variability in perception, mood, or performance comparison throughout a long day—in judged competitions, the order of performance can subtly influence scores. Athletes performing early may be forgotten or judged more harshly, while those competing later may benefit from more lenient or favorable comparisons—an outcome often attributed to the recency effect,

International figure skating and synchronized diving organizers are presumably aware of this possibility and account for judging differences across a series of competitors by randomizing the order of participant appearance. Contestants are judged over two rounds with a performance near the end of the second round being awarded to those with better scores in the first round. Despite this, recency effects persist; competitors who perform later in the day, near the end of the first round, tend to receive better scores in the first and final rounds. This is troubling, as contestant fate seems in the hands of chance. However, the reality is that when judging a serially occurring sequence of performances, judges can only compare the most recent performance to any one that preceded it but cannot compare to any performance that occur afterward. Recency effects, it seems, are a necessary artifact of certain types of performance and competition.

Finances and Employment. Recency effects can also have serious consequences for employment and financial investments. In terms of employment, primacy and recency effects can influence which job candidates a hiring manager remembers best as well as their first and last impressions of a candidate. Consequently, hiring managers and human resources personnel must use alternative strategies to ensure fairer, less biased hiring decisions, such as spacing interviews more widely or rotating the order in which candidates meet with interviewers.

Conclusion

The order that things appear affects everything from whether people will remember them to how well or poorly they are rated. There are several things that individuals can do to increase their odds when something important is at stake. During a job interview or other performance rating, present the most favorable information near the end. It is more likely to take precedence as the last thing the other party remembers. This is also the case for any presentation and possibly evidence during legal proceedings. When studying information or memorizing data, placing the most essential portions at the beginning or end of the list and/or the beginning or end of the study period may be beneficial. If judging a series of choices involving preference, putting the choice you are least likely to prefer at the beginning or end ensures it has the best chance of being judged fairly; making pairwise comparisons between items rather than judging every subsequent item based on the first may also improve subjectivity. In judging formal competition, viewing a series of contestants over a longer period so that smaller groups can be judged may limit the influence of the recency effect. Another strategy is having a pool of judges who rotate in and out so that for each competitor, many judges do not compare their performance to that of every contestant who precedes them.


Bibliography

Cherry, Kendra. “The Recency Effect in Psychology.” Verywell Mind, 18 Mar. 2026, www.verywellmind.com/the-recency-effect-4685058. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Garbinsky, Emily N., et al. “Interference of the End: Why Recency Bias in Memory Determines When a Food Is Consumed Again.” Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 8, 2014, pp. 1466–74, doi:10.1177/0956797614534268. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Kramer, Robin S. S. “Sequential Effects in Olympic Synchronized Diving Scores.” Royal Society Open Science, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, article 160812, doi:10.1098/rsos.160812. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Li, C. “Primacy Effect or Recency Effect? A Long-Term Memory Test of the 2006 Super Bowl Commercials.” Proceedings of the 2007 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference, Springer, 2015. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-11806-2_4. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Mantonakis, Antonia, et al. “Order in Choice: Effects of Serial Position on Preferences.” Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 11, 2009, pp. 1309–21, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02453.x. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Murphy, Jamie, et al. “Primacy and Recency Effects on Clicking Behavior.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 522–35. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00025.x. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Ritholtz, Barry. “Confusing What Just Happened with What Happens Next.” Bloomberg, 4 Aug. 2015, www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-08-04/what-just-happened-versus-what-happens-next. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.

Rock, David, et al. “Behind the Clicks: Can Amazon Allocate User Attention as It Pleases?” Information Economics and Policy, vol. 69, 2024, doi:10.1016/j.infoecopol.2024.101115.

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