Newer research, however, shows that the recency effect can exist without STM. For instance, Bjork and Whitten showed that even when STM was engaged there may be a delayed, long-term recency effect. During their study, they added a "continuous" distractor task to free recall to suppress STM. This meant participants did a distractor task after each item was presented. Because this did not eliminate the recency effect as expected, some psychologists suspected that the recency effect is based on a theory of temporal context (literally meaning the context of time). Although theories in this field are vague and still developing. The general idea remains that a contextual element is attached to each item on the list. During recall, the test’s context will act as a (a prompt that will help us remember). The later the item in the list, the similar the presentation context would be to test context. However, recall is probably dependent on the effectiveness of the retrieval cue.