That is, people who can recall specific examples of an event may believe that event occurs more often than it really does. Similarly, when examples cannot be brought to mind, the frequency of the event is judged to be lower. Chance or coincidental events that are highly memorable are thus often judged to be regular or common. And, of course, information you cannot remember is not going to be used in making a decision. We all have so much information flowing into our consciousness every day that we just cannot keep track of all of it.
New information pushes out old.
Had the information arrived in a different order, our decision would have been different. The cure to this bias is to take good notes and review them regularly, so that newer information will not automatically enjoy a privileged position of influence. The two periods of greatest attention, whether in moments or months, are at the very beginning and the very end. Therefore, information presented or received first and last in a project, problem, research project, class session, or meeting will be remembered better and given more importance than it would otherwise deserve. Similarly, information arriving in the middle of a project may be unfairly discounted or ignored, simply because of its position in the data stream.