In 1971, Dewey Rundus developed a technique called overt rehearsal (participants were asked to recite their thoughts out loud), to test "how" and "when" participants rehearsed each item in a list. In 1977 Brodie and Murdock, used the overt rehearsal technique to offer an alternate explanation for the primacy effect. They discovered that even as participants got towards the end of the list, they were still rehearsing initial terms. Because of this, the initial items were still present in the participant's short-term memory (STM) towards the end of the list, creating a recency effect. Though Brodie and Murdock acknowledged that rehearsal is essential to the primacy effect, they asserted that the primacy effect may indirectly be a type of recency effect.