The serial position effect has been studied extensively for many years. Researchers have designed a variety of different studies in order to analyze and explain both, the primacy and the recency effect. The primacy effect is the tendency for the first items presented in a series of words to be recalled more easily, or to be more influential than those presented at the end of the list. On the other end, there is also the recency effect. The recency effect is the tendency to recall the items located at the end of the list. Many studies have been designed to analyze how the primacy effect works and its accuracy. For instance, research compared the primacy and the recency effect (Jahnke, 1965). Forty-eight college students read lists of 6, 10, and 15 English words in a counterbalanced order. Twenty-four of the students were given instructions for the immediate serial recall of the list; while the other half of students were not aware that they would need to recall words from a list. Both groups received a total of 12 different lists. The words were read at a rate of one word per sec without any emphasis on specific word. In addition to that, the participants’ responses were recorded in an interval of 30 seconds. Results showed that the recency effect is stronger for free serial recall and for a longer interval than primacy effect (Jahnke, 1965). When instructions were given for a serial recall, primacy effects were stronger and recency effect weaker than when instructions were given for free recall. As the length of lists increased, the recency effect became stronger and more accurate.
Murdock (1962) conducted another experiment in order to analyze free recall. Six groups of participants had different combinations of list lengths...
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.... Serial Position Effect for Repeated Free Recall: Negative Recency or Positive Primacy? Journal of Experimental Psychology, 96(1), 10-16. doi:10.1037/h0033479
Huan, I-N., Tomasini, J., & Nikl, L. (1977). The primacy and recency effects in successive single-trial immediate free recall. The Journal of General Psychology, 97(2), 157-165. doi:10.1080/00221309.1977.9920834
Jahnke, John (1965). Primacy and recency effects in serial-position curves of immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70(1), 130-133. doi:10.1037/h0022013
Murdock Bennet B., Jr. (1962). The serial position effect of free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(5), 482-488. doi: 10.1037/h0045106
Ward, Geoff (2002). A Recency-based account of the list length effect in free recall. Memory & Cognition, 30(6), 885-892. doi:10.3758/BF03195774
Roediger III, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cogntion, 21, 803-814.
Marsh, R. L., Cook, G. I., & Hicks, J. L. (2006). The effect of context variability on source memory. Memory & Cognition (Pre-2011), 34(8), 1578-86.
Altogether this study has helped us learn more about the brain and memory. Learning is measured thorough when a student can reiterate the right answer to a question. In this study, students in one conditions learned forging language vocabulary words in standard example of recurrent study exam trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly formed the language item, it was constantly studied but dropped from further testing. Repeatedly tested but dropped from the further study or just dropped from both the study and also the test. The results reveal the critical part of retrieval practice in combining education and shows that even college students seem naive of the fact.
...Baddeley (1966) study of encoding in the short term memory and long term memory supports the MSM model on the mode of processing such that words are processed on recall and both models share the same opinion that processing does influence recall. Finally, the MSM model of memory states that all information is stored in the long term memory, however, this interpretation contrasts with that of Baddeley (1974) who argue that we store different types of memories and it is unlikely that they occur only in the LTM store. Additionally, other theories have recognised different types of memories that we experience, therefore it is debatable that all these different memories occur only in the long-term memory as presumed by the multi-store model which states the long term memory store as with unlimited capacity, in addition it also fails to explain how we recall information.
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera” (Walker, 2013). In fact, human memory is quite the opposite of a video camera; it can be greatly influenced and even often distorted by interactions with its surroundings (Walker, 2013). Memory is separated into three different phases. The first phase is acquisition, which is when information is first entered into memory or the perception of an event (Samaha, 2011). The next phase is retention. Retention is the process of storing information during the period of time between the event and the recollection of a piece of information from that event (Samaha, 2011). The last stage is retrieval. Retrieval is recalling stored information about an event with the purpose of making an identification of a person in that event (Samaha, 2011).
Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.
Farrants, J. (1998, September). The 'false' memory debate. Counseling Psychology Quarterly. Retrieved September 14, 2000 from ProQuest database (Bell & Howell Information and Learning-ProQuest) on the World Wide Web: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb
Roebers, C.M., Moga, N., & Schneider, W. (2001). The role of accuracy motivation on children’s and adults’ event recall. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 78, 313-329.
In this experiment we replicated a study done by Bransford and Johnson (1972). They conducted research on memory using schemas. All human beings possess categorical rules or scripts that they use to interpret the world. New information is processed according to how it fits into these rules, called schemas. Bransford and Johnson did research on memory for text passages that had been well comprehended or poorly comprehended. Their major finding was that memory was superior for passages that were made easy to comprehend. For our experiment we used two different groups of students. We gave them different titles and read them a passage with the intentions of finding out how many ideas they were able to recall. Since our first experiment found no significant difference, we conducted a second experiment except this time we gave the title either before or after the passage was read. We found no significant difference between the title types, but we did find a significant difference between before and after. We also found a significant title type x presentation interaction. We then performed a third experiment involving showing objects before and after the passage was read. There we did encountersome significant findings. The importance and lack of findings is discussed and we also discuss suggestions for future studies, and how to improve our results.
Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control process.
The Effect of Imagery on Recall Introduction: In cognitive psychology there are many ways in which people can enhance memory - mnemonics. This study is based on how imagery helps. memory. I will be able to do that.
...Dermott, K. B. (1996). Misinformation effects in recall: Creating false memories through repeated retrieval. Journal of Memory and Language, 5(2), 300-318. doi: 10.1006/jmla.1996.0017
Stern, L. D., Marrs, S., Millar, M.G. & Cole, E. (1984). Processing Time and th Recall of Inconsistent and Consistent Behviors of Individuals and Groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 253-262.
In the field of cognitive neuroscience a memory study usually involves a combination of behavioral tasks and a machine that permits t...
Weiner, I. Healy, A. Freedheim, D. Proctor,R.W., Schinka,J.A. (2003) Handbook of Psychology: Experimental psychology,18, pp 500