Next-in-line effect¶
A memory impairment for information presented immediately before one's anticipated turn to perform, attributed to self-focused preparation and anxiety.
Core Idea¶
The effect is position-specific rather than general recency failure and can vary with performance demand, rehearsal, social evaluation and task design; evidence should separate encoding disruption from retrieval explanations. Attention shifts from the current speaker or item toward planning one's own imminent response, reducing encoding resources for the few events just before the turn. The abstraction is therefore identified by a declared carrier, a transformation or constraint over that carrier, and an invariant that tells an analyst whether the named structure is genuinely present.
Scope of Application¶
Next-in-line effect belongs to cognitive psychology and is useful where the analyst can specify the typed cognitive psychology carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets, then evaluate the participant sequence and performance task, serial position relative to the participant's turn, material and exposure, recall test, anticipatory demand, matched control positions and statistical evidence for a pre-turn deficit are explicit. The scope is broad within that domain but bounded by the need for the participant sequence and performance task, serial position relative to the participant's turn, material and exposure, recall test, anticipatory demand, matched control positions and statistical evidence for a pre-turn deficit are explicit.
Clarity¶
The abstraction clarifies a crowded vocabulary by making the participant sequence and performance task, serial position relative to the participant's turn, material and exposure, recall test, anticipatory demand, matched control positions and statistical evidence for a pre-turn deficit are explicit the center of the account. A claim should name the carrier, the governing operation or relation, the applicable assumptions, and the recognition test.
Manages Complexity¶
Without the abstraction, an analyst must reason directly over many local details: the carrier roles, admissibility assumptions, competing conventions, derived invariants, boundary cases, and proof or validation obligations specific to Next-in-line effect. Next-in-line effect compresses them into the roles in the structural signature. That compression permits comparison across instances without erasing the variables that determine validity. It also exposes which details may be varied safely and which are constitutive.
Abstract Reasoning¶
- Identify the carrier. State what the elements, states, objects, or observations are: the typed cognitive psychology carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets. Reject examples whose alleged carrier belongs to a different problem. 2. Lock the constitutive rule. Express the participant sequence and performance task, serial position relative to the participant's turn, material and exposure, recall test, anticipatory demand, matched control positions and statistical evidence for a pre-turn deficit are explicit independently of one notation or implementation.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Knowledge transfers strongly among subfields of cognitive psychology because they reuse the typed cognitive psychology carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets, Attention shifts from the current speaker or item toward planning one's own imminent response, reducing encoding resources for the few events just before the turn., and type the carrier, state every parameter and convention in the definition, test that the participant sequence and performance task, serial position relative to the participant's turn, material and exposure, recall test, anticipatory demand, matched control positions and statistical evidence for a pre-turn deficit are explicit, compare the nearest accepted identity, and report counterexamples, uncertainty, and limiting cases.
Relationships to Other Abstractions¶
Current abstraction Next-in-line effect Domain-specific
Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on
-
Next-in-line effect is a kind of Attentional Capacity Prime
The proposed strict upward parent is
prime:attentional_capacity.
Hierarchy paths (2) — routes to 2 parentless roots
- Next-in-line effect → Attentional Capacity → Channel Capacity
- Next-in-line effect → Attentional Capacity → Attention
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Next-in-line effect sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (4th percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.
Family — Learning, Memory & Perception (31 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Law of effect — 0.94
- Mood-dependent memory — 0.94
- Attenuation theory — 0.93
- Echoic memory — 0.93
- Narrative bias — 0.93
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-09-08