recency

Recency is a concept describing the tendency to give greater weight to the most recent items, events, or information when forming beliefs, memories, or judgments. It is not a property of the world so much as a bias in perception and processing that depends on time. Recency often interacts with primacy, the opposite tendency to favor earlier items.

In psychology, the recency effect is a component of the serial position effect, whereby items at the end of a list are recalled more accurately than those in the middle. This effect is attributed to residual activation in short-term memory and to differing rehearsal strategies. It tends to fade with longer delays, interference, or when additional cognitive load disrupts maintenance.

In decision making and information evaluation, recency bias refers to giving disproportionate weight to recent experiences or data, potentially neglecting past information. It can influence judgments in finance, risk assessment, and public policy, and is linked to the availability heuristic. Mitigation strategies include explicit weighting rules, checklists, and baselining performance against longer histories.

In information processing, recency weighting is used in time-sensitive applications to prioritize new observations. Time-decay models, recency-weighted averages, and streaming analytics can improve responsiveness, though they can also increase volatility if the decay is too rapid.

Recency also appears in everyday language to describe the present or near past relative to a reference time, and in historical analysis to indicate proximity to the current moment. Related concepts include primacy effect, serial position effect, and recency bias.