Chapter 5. Serial Position Effect
Serial Positive Effect
When information is presented in a list, some items are easier to remember than others. Can you predict which items people are more likely to remember? Consider a test of your memory when a series of 16 words is presented to you one at a time. Then you are asked to recall as many as you can.
Serial Positive Effect
Did you notice a pattern in your results? Most people perform better at recalling the first and last words in the list than the words in the middle. The tendency to remember early words in the list is called the primacy effect. The tendency to remember the last few words in the list, especially when the recall test occurs immediately after viewing the list, is called the recency effect. The overall tendency to best recall the last and first items in a list is known as the serial position effect.
Serial Positive Effect
Explain the Primacy Effect. The primacy effect probably occurred because you were able to rehearse the first few words several times before the number of list items overwhelmed your short-term memory capacity; so you were able to encode those words properly.
What happens in the Middle? Once you got to the middle of the list, your working memory was not able to rehearse the initial words AND pay attention to the new words at the same time. The middle words didn't get much rehearsal, so they probably faded away quickly.
Explain the Recency Effect. The recency effect probably occurred because the last few words were still in short-term memory when you were asked to recall the list. If you are like most people, one of the first words you typed came from the end of the list.
Serial Positive Effect
When we try to memorize a list of items, we usually rehearse the items, repeating the list silently to maintain it in consciousness or encode it for storage. We do this when trying to remember a phone number, a grocery list, directions to a house, or the names of people we meet at a party. The serial position effect is our tendency to recall best the last and first items in the list. When you are introduced to a group of people, the last few names you hear will probably be remembered the best (the recency effect). The first few names will be rehearsed more, so they also are likely to be remembered (the primacy effect). The names in the middle are the most likely to be forgotten. When there is a time delay between meeting the people and recalling their names, the primacy effect remains but the recency effect diminishes.