Richard Linklater’s Humanism: Moral Primacy, Recency Effects and SubUrbia

In serial memory processing, the first and last items in a memory set are easier to recall than those in the middle" researchers find that people generally recollect details at the beginning and end of lists of information more quickly, and with greater accuracy. This is known as the serial position effect, constitutive of a pair of cognitive biases that together hold implications for our understanding of narrative: privileged recall of "prime" information is known as the primacy effect, while recall of the most "recent" information is known as the recency effect. Information from the beginning and ending of a filmed narrative is similarly privileged in memory due to such a primacy-recency sequencing, and this temporal dimension can inform accounts of a spectator's experience of narrative, implicating the ways in which stories work with our cognitive biases in order to make causal sense.