“Funny how we take it for granted that we know all there is to know about another person, just because we see them frequently or because of some strong emotional tie.” (Psycho)

Dr. Sönke AhrensOn page 117 of "How to Take Smart Notes" you write the following: "The slip-box not only confronts us with dis-confirming information, butalso helps with what is known as the feature-positive effect (Allison andMessick 1988; Newman, Wolff, and Hearst 1980; Sainsbury 1971). This isthe phenomenon in which we tend to overstate the importance of informationthat is (mentally) easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the mostrecently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Withoutexternal help, we would not only take exclusively into account what weknow, but what is on top of our heads.[35] The slip-box constantly remindsus of information we have long forgotten and wouldn’t remember otherwise –so much so, we wouldn’t even look for it."My question for you: Why have you chosen to use the Feature-Positive Effect as the phenomenon to make your point and not the recency bias?The recency bias seems more aligned with your point of our minds favoring recently learned information/knowledge over already existing, perhaps more relevant, cognitive schemata.To my mind, the FPE states that it is easier to detect patterns when the unique stimuli indicating the pattern is present rather than absent... In the following example:Pattern in this sequence: 1235 8593 0591 2531 8532 (all numbers have a 5; the unique feature is present) Pattern in this sequence: 1236 8193 0291 2931 8472 (no numbers contain a 5; the unique feature is absent)The pattern in the first sequence is more easily spotted than the pattern in the second sequence, this is the feature-positive effect. This has not much to do with your point.I do get what you are coming from, namely that we are biased towards what is more readily in mind; however, the extension of this argument with the comparison of relevance vs. time makes the recency bias or availability heuristic more applicable; and also easier to explain in my opinion.Once again, I am simply curious what made you choose the FPE as the phenomenon to explain.I hope you take the time to read this and respond to it. Thanks in advance.Sources in the comments

Hey Matthew, it's a fair point. Without having the whole passage or a previous draft in front of me, it could be simply the outcome of the editing process. It does read like you said: as if I had recency bias in mind (next to other fitting ones), which then got lost after having shortened it for readability. That's my best guess. Even though it is tempting in these cases to come up with some post-hoc, smart sounding reason...

We also tend to preferinformation we have seen more recently to informationwe learned a long time ago.

Now, this may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who spendsmuch time watching the news, let alone who knows much about thehistory of the twentieth century.