Preverbal infants (7 months of age) were repeatedly shown a fixed series of photographs of adult female faces. The effects of the order of presentation of a photo (first, middle, or last) and the duration of retention (5 sec, 1 min, or 5 min) were subsequently assessed in a proberecognition test. Both primacy and recency effects were obtained, but there was no evidence of recognition of the face that appeared in the middle of the series. There was also no evidence of recognition of the most recently studied face following the 5-min retention interval. The bowed serial-position function and labile recency effect match those found in the performance of older subjects in classical verbal learning tasks, and we suggest an automatic process underlying these effects. Our explanation emphasizes differential learning and the context of the items to be remembered.It has generally been acknowledged since antiquity that human learning, memory, and the organization of ideas are affected by the temporal succession of experience. Hence, one of the first problems for experimental psychology was to describe and explain the lawful relations between the order of events and their mental representation. Ebbinghaus (1885/1964) is credited with the isolation of one of the most prevalent relations, the serial-position effect. The serial-position effect occurs when an item (word, picture, or action) to be remembered appears in an invariant sequence of other items (a list). Learning and memory of the item are related to its serial position in the list-if it occurs in the middle of the sequence, it is less likely to be remembered than if it occurs at the beginning or the end. The advantage at the beginning of a list is termed "the primacy effect," and the advantage at the end of a list is termed "the recency effect."Crowder (1976) recently reviewed several explanations for these effects, and in the present analysis we focus on two dimensions used by Crowder to categorize these explanations. First, there are explanations that maintain that a single process is responsible for both the primacy and the recency effects, and there are twoprocess explanations that describe separate mechanisms. Second, there are explanations that emphasize passive or automatic processes and other explanations that emphasize strategic or semantic cognition.