The next-in-line effect is a memory phenomenon where people fail to remember what was said or done immediately before their turn to speak or perform in a group. If you’ve ever blanked on what the person right before you said during a round of introductions, this is why. Your brain was so busy preparing for your own performance that it stopped recording incoming information.
How the Effect Was Discovered
Psychologist Malcolm Brenner first documented this effect in 1973. In his experiment, people sat in a square and took turns reading words aloud from cards while others listened. Everyone was then tested on which words they could recall. The results showed a distinctive pattern: people who were about to perform consistently failed to remember the words read in the nine seconds before and after their turn. Brenner called this the “scallop effect” because recall dipped sharply around each person’s performance, creating a scallop-shaped curve in the data. The harder the performance task, the bigger the memory gap.
Why It Happens
The next-in-line effect is an encoding failure, not a retrieval failure. That distinction matters. Your brain isn’t storing the information and then losing access to it later. It never records the information in the first place. When you know your turn is coming, your attention shifts inward to rehearsing, planning, or worrying about what you’re going to say. That internal focus crowds out the ability to process what’s happening around you.
Researchers confirmed this in a clever experiment with 144 undergraduates. One group was told beforehand that they’d need to remember what others said right before their turn. That group actually reversed the deficit and showed superior recall for the moments before their performance. A second group, given the same recall instructions only after the task was over, showed the typical memory gap. If the information had been stored but hard to access, both groups would have performed the same on the recall test. The fact that only advance warning helped proves the problem is at the encoding stage: your brain simply isn’t paying attention to external input when it’s focused on preparing to perform.
Social Anxiety Makes It Worse
Not everyone experiences the next-in-line effect equally. A study of 96 undergraduates found that people who scored high on a social anxiety scale suffered significant preperformance memory deficits, while people who scored low on the same scale did not show the effect at all. The explanation is straightforward: anxious individuals spend more mental energy worrying about their upcoming performance, leaving even fewer cognitive resources available to process what’s happening around them. The anxiety doesn’t just make the experience unpleasant; it actively disrupts encoding of ongoing events.
This finding also ruled out another possible explanation. Some researchers had proposed that the memory gap might be caused by state-dependent retrieval, where information learned in one emotional state becomes harder to access in a different emotional state. The data didn’t support that theory. The deficit was driven by anxiety consuming attention during encoding, full stop.
Where You’ll Notice It
The classic example is a round of introductions. By the time you’ve said your own name and fun fact, you’ve likely forgotten the name of the person who went right before you. But the effect shows up in many group settings where people take sequential turns.
In classrooms, students waiting for their turn to read aloud or present often miss what their classmates are saying. This is a real problem for learning, because the material being covered by other students doesn’t get absorbed. The same dynamic plays out in business meetings and collaborative work sessions. When people know they’ll be called on to share an update or pitch an idea, they tend to mentally check out of whatever is being discussed in the moments before their turn. Key details from colleagues’ contributions get lost.
Group presentations, panel discussions, debate formats, even casual dinner conversations where a story is making the rounds can all trigger the effect. Any situation where you can anticipate your turn and feel some degree of performance pressure creates the conditions for it.
How to Reduce the Effect
The research points to one core principle: the effect disappears when people deliberately direct their attention outward before their turn. In the encoding study, simply telling participants ahead of time that they’d need to recall preperformance information was enough to eliminate (and even reverse) the deficit. That suggests the effect isn’t inevitable. It’s a default attentional pattern that can be overridden with conscious effort.
In practical terms, this means a few things. If you’re leading a meeting or classroom activity, avoid predictable turn-taking order. When people can’t anticipate exactly when they’ll be called on, they’re less likely to shift into internal rehearsal mode at a specific moment. Randomizing the order keeps everyone engaged with the current speaker for longer.
If you know you’re about to speak, try to keep a small part of your attention on what the current speaker is saying rather than rehearsing your own contribution. Even jotting down a word or two from their remarks forces your brain to process their input. Notes serve as an external memory system that compensates for the encoding gap. You can also prepare your own remarks well in advance so that the moments right before your turn require less mental rehearsal, freeing up cognitive resources to listen.
For high-stakes settings like team meetings where everyone’s input matters, sharing agendas and talking points in writing beforehand reduces the need for real-time mental preparation. When people already know what they’re going to say, the anticipatory anxiety drops and the encoding failure is less likely to kick in.