in 1971, dewey rundus created a what he called "overt rehearsal" the people were told to say their thoughts out loud, this tested test "how" and "when" participants rehearsed each item in a list. in 1977, brodie and murdock used overt rehearsal to give an alternate explanation for the primacy effect. they learned that even as people got towards the end of the list, they were still repeating the first terms. this caused the items to still be inthe person's short-term memory (stm) near the end of the list. this created what is called a "recency effect". brodie and murdock said that rehearsal is a main cause of the primacy effect. they also believed that the primacy effect may be a type of "recency effect".