serial position effect

The Serial Position Effect

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• Caption: The Serial Position Curve

3 parts to the Serial Position Effect

• Primacy Effect - High recall for the first few items in a list.
• Recency Effect - High recall for the last few items in a list.
• Intermediate Effect - Low recall of middle items in a list.

Explanation

• You are more likely to remember the first and last few items in a list because you are actively trying to remember the first few items and then the last few items are fresh in your mind, so you remember them too.
• You are less likely to remember the middle items in a list because you actively try to remember the first few items and so miss or don't concentrate on the middle items.

Interference tasks

• An interference tasks is a task, often numerical, that a participant in a word recall study may be given to complete after hearing the words but before recalling them. If this is the case, they are likely to only remember the first few words that they were actively trying to remember and not the last few because they are no longer recent.
• An example of a study that used numerical interference tasks is Baddeley in his study of acoustically and semantically similar words.