Have you ever noticed that when you are trying to remember a series of information, maybe a grocery list, you remember items at the beginning and the end of the list best? This is the serial position effect in action. The serial position effect is a cognitive bias that describes how the position of an item in a sequence effects our ability to remember it. The serial position effect was first discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 during a series of memory experiments. (Krastev & Pilat, 2021) According to the serial position effect, we best remember things at the beginning and end of a sequence. Together we are going to explore the cause and implications of this bias.

So why does this cognitive bias happen to us? What causes the serial position effect? Basically, it all comes down to how our memory works and a combination of two other biases, the recency effect and the recency effect. (Krastev & Pilat, 2021) The combination of these two effects together causes the serial position effect to occur. We will now look at what each of these two effects are and why they occur.

Presidential Recall

Many researchers have studied the serial position effect. One study that beautifully illustrates the bias was done by Henry L. Roediger III and Robert G. Crowder in 2013. In their investigation of the serial position effect, they asked a group of 159 college students to name all the presidents of the United States. They had them both create a list of the presidents they remembered and make a numbered list of the presidents based on their term in office. Guess what they found, with the exception of President Lincoln the memorability of the presidents was strongly correlated with their chronological order and the presidents at the beginning and end of the series were remembered best. (Crowder & Roediger, 2013)

Long-Term Recency Effect

As we have seen, the main theory of why the recency effect occurs is that the information remains in the working memory. What happens to the recency effect if there is a delay between obtaining the information and the recall of said information. A group of scientists did a series of four experiments in 1980 that shed some light on this. They created a study looking at the long-term serial position effect by presenting a group of 60 undergraduate college students with word pairs and then having them recall the word pairs after a distractor task. They found that the recency effect still occurs when there is a delay between presentation and recall. They hypothesize that this long-term recency effect is due to the use of contextual-temporal cues as a retrieval strategy. (Glenberg et al., 1980)

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Crowder, R. & Roediger, H. (1976). A serial position effect in recall of United States presidents. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 8(4), 275-278. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/bf03335138 

Cruz-Eusebio, J. (2022, August 5). Serial position effect in marketing: How ad position effects audience. Brax. https://www.brax.io/blog/serial-position-effect-in-marketing-how-ad-position-and-frequency-affect-your-audience 

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Glenberg, A. M., Bradley, M. M., Stevenson, J. A., Kraus, T. A., Tkachuk, M. J., Gretz, A. L., Fish, J. H., & Turpin, B. M. (1980). A two-process account of long-term serial position effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6(4), 355–369. https://doi-org.ezproxy.bethel.edu/10.1037/0278-7393.6.4.355

Krastev, S. & Pilat, D. (2021). Serial Position Effect. The Decision Lab. Retrieved January 19, 2025, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/serial-position-effect 

McLeod, P. (2024, June 10). Serial Position Effect (Glanzer & Cunitz, 1966). Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/primacy-recency.html