<P> In 2013, a study showed that primacy effect is also prominent in decision making based on experience in a repeated - choice paradigm, a learning process also known as operant conditioning . The authors showed that importance attached to the value of the first reward on subsequent behaviour, a phenomenon they denoted as outcome primacy . </P> <P> In another study, participants received one of two sentences . For example, one may be given "Steve is smart, diligent, critical, impulsive, and jealous ." and the other "Steve is jealous, impulsive, critical, diligent, and smart ." These two sentences contain the same information . The first one suggests positive trait at the beginning while the second one has negative traits . Researchers found that the subjects evaluated Steve more positively when given the first sentence, compared with the second one . </P> <P> Two traditional classes of theories explain the recency effect . </P> <P> These models postulate that later study list items are retrieved from a highly accessible short - term buffer, i.e. the short - term store (STS) in human memory . This allows items that are recently studied to have an advantage over those that were studied earlier, as earlier study items have to be retrieved with greater effort from one's long - term memory store (LTS). </P>

Using the principles of encoding explain why the primacy effect and recency effect occur