Why Can the Ending Reshape Our Memory of an Experience?

When recalling a meeting, a trip or a period of discomfort, we do not necessarily average every minute. Overall evaluations are often influenced strongly by the most intense moment and by the ending. This pattern is known as the peak–end effect.

In a classic cold-water experiment, participants completed two unpleasant hand-immersion trials. One lasted sixty seconds. The other included the same sixty seconds plus another thirty seconds during which the water became slightly warmer and the discomfort eased. The longer trial contained more total discomfort, yet many participants preferred to repeat it. The researchers argued that the choice reflected how the episode was later remembered: the gentler ending improved the retrospective evaluation.

This does not mean duration never matters, or that every experience is determined by only two moments. The pattern varies with the type of experience, changes in intensity, measurement method and delay before recall. Later work suggests that the peak, the ending and the average across the episode can all carry information. A brief sensory task also cannot simply stand in for relationships, trauma or long-term work.

The more careful conclusion is that feeling an experience and later summarising it are not the same measurement. The ending may matter not because it erases what came before, but because it is especially available when memory constructs a summary and supplies a sense of how the episode resolved. When reviewing an activity, it helps to look beyond “How did it feel overall?” to records of the process, its duration and its different stages, so that one prominent ending does not speak for the whole period.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2970645/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6668632/