newer research has shown that the recency effect can exist without stm. for instance, bjork and whitten showed that even when stm was distracted there can be a long-term recency effect. during their study, they had the people do something to affect their stm during the entire test. these test showed that there was still some recency effect . some psychologists think that the recency effect is based on a theory of temporal context. temporal context means "the context of time". theories in this field are vague and still developing. the general idea is that context is connected to each item on the list. during recall, this contect will help the person remember the item. the later the item in the list, the more similar the context of the item is to context of the test.