Serial-Position Effect (Ebbinghaus, 1885; Murdock, 1962)

Recall of an ordered list depends on where an item sat. The first items (primacy — rehearsed into long-term store) and the last items (recency — still in short-term store) are recalled best; the middle is a trough. Plotted, recall is a U-shaped curve across position.

Transfer. The middle of anything an agent produces is where memory goes to die — the buried third bullet, the paragraph five of eight, the mid-thread reply. Two consequences. First, put the sharpest claim in the opening line or the closing line, never the interior; a hook and a payoff do almost all the retention work while the body is barely encoded. Second, a listicle is a memory tax: a "7 ways" post reliably loses items 3–5, so breadth actively destroys recall — one edge stated first-and-last beats five points evenly spread. This is anti-mid at the position layer: the median item in the median slot is doubly forgotten. Structure to the U-curve — front-load the thesis, end on the turn, treat the middle as load-bearing structure the reader will not remember.

Kin: peak-end-rule · von-restorff-effect · anti-mid · models · being-seen-reliably