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. Recency effect Two traditional classes of theories explain the recency effect. Dual-store models These models postulate that study items listed last 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). An important prediction of such models is that the presentation of a distraction, for example solving arithmetic problems for 10–30 seconds, during the retention period (the time between list presentation and test) attenuates the recency effect. Since the STS has limited capacity, the distraction displaces later study list items from the STS so that at test, these items can only be retrieved from the LTS, and have lost their earlier advantage of being more easily retrieved from the short-term buffer. As such, dual-store models successfully account for both the recency effect in immediate recall tasks, and the attenuation of such an effect in the delayed free recall task. A major problem with this model, however, is that it cannot predict the long-term recency effect observed in delayed recall, when a distraction intervenes between each study item during the interstimulus interval (continuous distractor task). Since the distraction is still present after the last study item, it should displace the study item from STS such that the recency effect is attenuated. The existence of this long-term recency effect thus raises the possibility that immediate and long-term recency effects share a common mechanism. Single-store models According to single-store theories, a single mechanism is responsible for serial-position effects. A first type of model is based on relative temporal distinctiveness, in which the time lag between the study of each list item and the test determines the relative competitiveness of an item’s memory trace at retrieval. In this model, end-of-list items are thought to be more distinct, and hence more easily retrieved. Another type of model is based on contextual variability, which postulates that retrieval of items from