Primacy, recency, and the availability heuristic

Abstract

Primacy and recency effects in recall were used to assess an availability heuristic for judging category-frequency information. By “over-representing” the less frequently occurring category in the early and late positions of a list, relative-frequency information for these positions was biased. This manipulation significantly affected frequency estimates, but only when recall was not requested prior to the frequency-judgment task. Factors other than differential recall of category instances are likely involved in judgments of category frequency and the possible role of “automatic” frequency encoding is discussed.