Next-in-line effect
You barely remember what was said just before your own turn to speak.
What it means
The next-in-line effect is the impaired memory for events, especially others' contributions, occurring immediately before one's own turn to perform in a sequence. The standard explanation is attentional: anticipatory rehearsal and anxiety about one's upcoming performance divert encoding resources away from the surrounding events. It is a clean demonstration that memory failures are often encoding failures driven by where attention was allocated, not retrieval failures. The effect generalizes from the original word-circle paradigm to meetings, classrooms, and introductions. It highlights the tight coupling between attention at encoding and what later becomes retrievable.
Examples
In a round of introductions, you forget the name of the person who spoke right before you because you were rehearsing your own.
In a stand-up where everyone reports in turn, you recall your own update perfectly but not a word of the blocker the colleague immediately before you raised.
Students reading aloud around a class remember the paragraph they read and the ones from early on, but not the passage read just before their own turn.
First described in Brenner (1973); Bond (1985).