Serial position effect (primacy/recency)

Biological Parallel

Foraging bumblebees remember the first flowers encountered and most recent discoveries, while middle experiences blur—working memory has limited capacity, so encoding peaks at sequence boundaries. Hummingbirds show the same pattern: they remember the first feeding station visited (primacy) and the last (recency), but middle stations blur into one another. Clark's nutcrackers, which cache up to 30,000 seeds per season, demonstrate extreme primacy and recency effects—they retrieve seeds from first and last cache sites with 80% accuracy, but middle sites drop to 60%. First items establish context, recent items reflect current state, and middle items add diminishing predictive value. This is why meeting agendas should start and end with critical decisions: memory evolved to remember edges, not middles.