Final answer:
The serial position effect describes the tendency to better remember items at the beginning and end of a list, due to the primacy and recency effects influencing memory encoding and retrieval.
Step-by-step explanation:
The phenomenon described is the serial position effect, which is observed in psychology when individuals have a propensity to recall the first and last items in a series more reliably than the middle items. This effect encompasses two separate biases: the primacy effect, showing better recall for items at the beginning of a list due to more time to encode them into long-term memory, and the recency effect, showing better recall for items at the end of a list because they are still in short-term memory.
Memory performance is not uniform across a sequence; items situated at the beginning (primacy) and the end (recency) are more easily remembered than those in the middle. Researchers suggest the reason for the primacy effect is due to the additional time to process and encode these items into long-term memory, while the recency effect arises because the items are still within the short-term memory store where they are easily accessible.