Whether you are listening to a speaker, or watching a movie, or reading a book, there seems to be a common theme among most people when it comes to remembering the content of the activity you were taking part in. A common problem is that we tend to remember what the beginning of the speech or book or movie was about, and we remember the end and the overall message of it, but when we are asked to recall the middle portion, and the details that it was comprised of, we seem to be completely stuck. So what is an explanation for this common issue?

This problem can be accredited to the term of “serial position effect” which states that we remember information at the beginning (primacy effect), the end (recency effect), better than we can remember information in the middle. The information at the beginning ties back to our long-term memory, and the information at the end ties back to our short-term memory.

I participated in a program in Washington D.C. a few years ago that was based on the current politics of that time. Throughout the week we had many different seminars that we attended, with various speakers presenting different arguments and power point presentations. At the end of each speaker, we were told to write a follow-up, almost like a critique on what the presentation was about, and our overall thoughts on the matter. I noticed that I started to struggle through these critiques sometimes because I in fact remembered the beginning of the presentation, the end wrap-up comments, but found myself stumbling when it came to remembering the details in the middle of the presentations. I thought this was maybe due to just dozing off a bit during the speeches, or daydreaming a little, but am glad to finally find out that this is an actual concept, and can be justified!

Because of the serial position effect, I was able to accurately remember the information that was presented at the beginning and the end of these speeches, but was not able to recall nearly as much of the information from the middle of the speeches. It is almost like all of the information in the middle just “went in one ear and out the other.” As stated before, this tends to be a common problem with anything such as sitting through a play or reading a book or watching a movie. It is not a bad thing to sometimes only remember the big picture of something, but we should all try a little harder to do our best to not let those details in the middle be forgotten!