Serial-position effect

en.wikipedia.org

33 points·prismatic··9 comments

Obviously the brain uses a doubly linked list and just stores pointers to the ends.

This is pretty much how I store and recall names. I noticed I often confuse names of the same length with the same first and last letters. Sometimes just the first two or three letters as well.

Me too! I've found that books with characters whose names begin with the same letter tend to cause me great confusion.

Names are just firstletter+garbage, which also means I can't recall any of the characters names when I've finished reading.

I'm similar. Something that's helped me in this regard is to mentally try to pronounce it the first few times I read an unfamiliar name. After that, it gets pegged with whatever pronunciation I chose and for me, I remember the name better.

> I noticed I often confuse names of the same length with the same first and last letters.

Fascinating, I have issues sometimes _remembering_ certain names in the first place (I've not yet discerned the pattern here...), but I cannot recall ever experiencing the variant of name confusion in the manner you are describing.

You may remember names by conjuring an image of the person, or a memory of them. Hard to say until you figure out the pattern. It took me a good 30+ years to notice it.

It also affects general recall for me. If I think a name might start with h, or be long, it may hurt my ability to recall it if it were th and short :)

This is handy for burying bad news.