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Recency effect

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The recency effect, in psychology, is a cognitive bias that results from disproportionate salience of recent stimuli or observations. For example, if a driver sees an equal total number of red cars as blue cars during a long journey, but there happens to be a glut of red cars at the end of the journey, he or she is likely to conclude that there were more red cars than blue cars throughout the drive.

The inverse of this effect is the primacy effect. The recency effect is compatible with the peak-end rule.

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