Page "Short-term memory" Paragraph 10

One proposed explanation of the existence of the recency effect in a continual distractor condition, and the disappearance of it in an end-only distractor task is the influence of contextual and distinctive processes.

According to this model, recency is a result of the final items ’ processing context being similar to the processing context of the other items and the distinctive position of the final items versus items in the middle of the list.

In the end distractor task, the processing context of the final items is no longer similar to the processing context of the other list items.

At the same time, retrieval cues for these items are no longer as effective as without the distractor.

Therefore, the recency effect recedes or vanishes.

However, when distractor tasks are placed before and after each item, the recency effect returns, because all the list items once again have similar processing context.