Serial position effect

The tendency for recall accuracy to vary with an item's position in a sequence, often producing stronger memory for items at the beginning and end.

Primacy effect: The tendency to recall early items in a sequence better than middle items. It names the beginning-of-list advantage in the serial position curve.
Episodic memory: Memory for personally experienced events situated in a particular time and place. List recall is a laboratory case of remembering a sequence of recent experiences.
Hermann Ebbinghaus: A German psychologist whose experiments on himself helped establish the experimental study of memory. His nineteenth-century serial-learning studies documented position-related differences in remembering.
Spacing effect: The finding that learning is often better when study sessions are distributed over time. Spacing study can improve retention beyond relying on an item's favorable place in one list.
Recency effect: The tendency to recall the most recently presented items better than earlier items. It names the end-of-list advantage that completes the characteristic curve.
Recall (memory): Retrieval of information from memory without the information being presented as a cue. The effect describes variation in recall, rather than recognition, across sequence positions.
Memory: The capacity to encode, retain, and retrieve information over time. The serial position effect is a measurable pattern within memory performance.
Testing effect: The finding that retrieving studied material can improve later retention more than restudying it. Repeated retrieval offers a learning strategy distinct from exploiting primacy or recency.
Working memory: A limited-capacity system for temporarily maintaining and manipulating information. Recent items can remain available in working memory during immediate recall.
Serial learning: Learning items in a particular order so that their sequence can later be reproduced. It supplies the ordered material whose positions are compared in the effect.

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