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.
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.