Next-in-Line Effect: Why You Miss What Was Said Just Before Your Turn

The effect is a gap in encoding, not a gap in memory for things that were stored. As your turn approaches, attention shifts from the room to your own coming performance: what you will say, how it will sound, who will be looking. The words spoken during that shift are heard but not processed deeply enough to be stored, so they cannot be retrieved later however hard you try. This is why the deficit is specific to the moments just before the turn.

Bond's 1985 experiments pinned the mechanism down. If the pre-turn words had been stored and then become hard to find, cues at recall should have helped and the deficit should have appeared whenever people tried harder. Neither happened. Semantic cues improved recall in general but did not touch the deficit, and asking people afterwards to concentrate on the pre-turn words did nothing, while asking them before the round reversed the effect entirely. A memory that can be rescued by an instruction given in advance, and not by one given afterwards, is a memory that was never formed.

Later work asked what kind of encoding fails. Bond, Pitre and van Leeuwen reported in 1991 that making participants verbally elaborate on each word eliminated the next-in-line effect, while manipulating eye contact did not, and concluded that the missing operation is elaborative rehearsal: the connecting and repeating that turns a heard word into a stored one. Innes found in 1982 that the deficit was large for loosely related words and small for strongly associated ones, which fits the same account, since associated words can be reconstructed from each other without much encoding at the time.

The effect is about anticipated performance, not about speech, and it is reported for the material just after one's turn as well, when attention is still on how the performance went. How large it is, and whether it is bigger in people who find performing stressful, has been studied but is not settled; the core finding, poor recall of what came just before one's turn, has been reproduced across the laboratory studies cited here.

Malcolm Brenner published "The next-in-line effect" in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior in 1973. Groups of participants took turns reading words aloud to one another, and at the end everyone wrote down as many of the words as they could recall. A separate set of participants listened to the same readings without performing.

The readers' recall had a hole in it. The words read immediately before each reader's own turn were recalled worse than words from elsewhere in the list, and the listeners, who faced no turn of their own, showed no corresponding dip for those words. Brenner's account was that preparing to perform takes attention away from what is being said, so the words in that window are not stored. The name he gave the finding has stuck.

John Innes replicated the design in 1982 in the British Journal of Social Psychology with one addition: the words were either strongly associated with one another or only loosely related. With strongly associated words, readers and listeners recalled about the same amount. With loosely related words, readers recalled significantly less than listeners, and the loss was concentrated on the words read just before their own performance.

Charles Bond's 1985 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "The next-in-line effect: Encoding or retrieval deficit?," settled the question in its title with two experiments. In the first, free and cued recall were compared; the cues helped recall overall but did not reduce the deficit. In the second, participants were told either before or after performing to make a special effort to remember the pre-performance events; the instruction given afterwards left the deficit intact, and the instruction given beforehand reversed it. The page's demo cannot put a real audience in the room, so it asks you to imagine one and then tests your predictions about these results rather than your memory for eight words.

The rows below are illustrations of where the moments before a turn go missing, not findings from the studies cited on this page.

The effect can be reversed by an instruction given in advance, which is the most useful fact about it.

• Decide beforehand to attend to what comes just before your turn. In Bond's experiments the same instruction given before the round reversed the deficit and given after it did nothing.
• Finish your own preparation early. The attention that leaves the room is attention spent rehearsing; if the rehearsal is done, it has less reason to leave.
• Give the preceding speaker a job in your opening. Planning to say "as Theo said" forces you to hear what Theo says.
• Elaborate, briefly, on what you hear. Repeating a name or restating a point to yourself is the encoding operation that the 1991 study found eliminated the effect.
• Use notes and recordings for anything that must be kept. Memory for the moments before a performance is unreliable for structural reasons, and no amount of effort afterwards recovers what was not stored.

Several entries describe attention that is somewhere other than on the material. This one is tied to a specific moment.

• It is not the spotlight effect, the overestimate of how much others are attending to you. The next-in-line effect is about where your own attention goes as your turn approaches; it does not depend on whether anyone is really watching, only on your expecting them to.
• It is not the serial-position effect, where the middle of a list is recalled worse than its ends. The dip here is anchored to your turn, wherever that falls in the list, and listeners with no turn do not show it for the same words.
• It is not absent-mindedness in general, the lapses that come from divided attention. The next-in-line effect is a predictable, well-placed lapse with a known cause, and it can be reversed by a single instruction given in advance.