Chapter 10 - Richard Linklater’s Humanism: Moral Primacy, Recency Effects, and SubUrbia

Summary

In serial memory processing, the first and last items in a memory set are easier to recall than those in the middle; researchers find that people generally recollect details at the beginning and end of lists of information more quickly, and with greater accuracy. This is known as the serial position effect, constitutive of a pair of cognitive biases that together hold implications for our understanding of narrative: privileged recall of “prime” information is known as the primacy effect, while recall of the most “recent” information is known as the recency effect. Information from the beginning and ending of a filmed narrative is similarly privileged in memory due to such a primacy-recency sequencing, and this temporal dimension can inform accounts of a spectator’s experience of narrative, implicating the ways in which stories work with our cognitive biases in order to make causal sense.

The relevance of this effect in film studies was noted by David Bordwell in 1985. Bordwell drew from narratologist Meir Sternberg’s notion of a reader updating hypotheses, expectations, and anticipation of narrative information to develop his own account of the ways in which audiovisual narratives “reward, modify, frustrate, or defeat the perceiver’s search for coherence” in concert with perceptive faculties, and expectations perceivers bring with prior knowledge of narratives in the form of “schemata.” Bordwell also borrows from Sternberg’s speculations on the narrative relevance of primacy and recency to explain how film viewers privilege different narrative information as it is presented over time; the time at which information is presented affects its salience, and ergo affects the audience’s ongoing probabilistic predictions and sense-making throughout engagement. In Narration in the Fiction Film, primacy and recency are “reasoning shortcuts” that inform inferences actively made by film spectators as the narrative unfolds. Primacy and recency work together: we bring prime information with us and run it by the most recent information, such that recency qualifies (in some cases negates) prime information. For instance, in his account of forking-path plots, Bordwell notes that:

the “recency effect” privileges the final future we see. Because endings are weightier than most other points in the narrative, and because forking-path tales tend to make the early stories preconditions for the last one, these plots suggest that the last future is the final draft, the one that “really” happened; or at least they reduce the others to fainter possibilities.