AP Psychology
The serial position effect refers to our tendency to be able to recall the first and last items in a list better than those in the middle.
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The Serial Position Effect is explained through cognitive psychology, which focuses on how people encode, process, and retrieve information. It suggests that attention and rehearsal affect memory encoding differently across a sequence.
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) and later experiments by other psychologists have shown that items at the beginning (primacy effect) and end (recency effect) of a list are more likely to be recalled than those in the middle.