How to Harness the 'Primacy Effect' to Remember Information Better

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Your brain is complex, but once you figure out its little intricacies—that it can only store about seven units of information in short-term memory, for example—you can exploit them to help you remember more things. It’s not just the amount of information present that affects your memory, though. Even the order in which you learn it plays a role. That's where the primacy effect comes into play.

What is the primacy effect?

The American Psychological Association defines the primacy effect as “the tendency for facts, impressions, or items that are presented first to be better learned or remembered than material presented later in the sequence.” This can happen when you’re learning for school or for pleasure (like when you meet someone at a party and they tell you about themselves). It can lead to a “first-impression bias,” which happens when the first piece of information you learn about someone colors how you see them to an inordinate degree.

On the other side of that spectrum is the recency effect, which happens when you remember the last thing you went over better than anything else. Those may seem like contradictory ideas, but they're both part of something broader called the serial position effect, which describes the natural tendency to recall material not just at the beginning, but also the end of a list, better than whatever is in the middle.

How to use this effect to study

With the primacy effect on one end and the recency effect on the other, it’s clear that whatever you learn in the middle of a study session is unlikely to make the cut in your memory. So if you have to study something, like a list of words or concepts, don’t study them in the same order every time. Make flashcards and study them at different times and in different orders. Shuffle them between every use. If there’s a concept you’re struggling with, though, try to focus on that at the beginning and end of every study session, maximizing the likelihood it’ll stick in your brain.

Flashcards are going to be important here. In general, I recommend studying flashcards using the Leitner method, which forces you to study your most difficult concepts more frequently than the easier ones. That approach is quite effective for memory formation, but you can't forget to shuffle the cards every time you review. Every flashcard app I've tested and reviewed offers them up to you in random order, whether you're following the Leitner approach or not— therefore, it might be better to rely on technology over old-school, hand-written notes. The analog approach allows you to be a little more intentional about battling the primacy and recency effects head-on.

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