Which principle states that the first items in a series are remembered best?

• A. Recency
• B. Intensity
• C. Association
• D. Primacy

Answer: (D)

The idea being tested is the primacy effect, a part of the serial position effect. The first items in a list tend to be remembered best because you have the most opportunity to pay attention to them and rehearse them, which helps transfer them into long-term memory. As the list continues, attention and rehearsal often shift to later items, so the earliest items get encoded more deeply and are recalled more reliably later. In contrast, remembering the last items well comes from the recency effect, which relies on those items still being held in short-term memory when recall happens. The other terms don’t describe this timing-based memory advantage.