Recency Effect

The Recency Effect was discussed in a 1962 paper by a psychologist named Bennet Murdock. Murdock discovered that the probability of a remembered word was dependent upon where it was positioned in the list. He learned that the list’s first few words were remembered pretty well, which is called the Primacy Effect.

After this, the likelihood of remembering the word dropped drastically — yet it increased again for the last eight words on the list. In the end, the last few words on the list had the highest likelihood of being remembered — giving birth to the Recency Effect.