The Forgotten Child

The Forgotten Middle Child of Memory: The Serial Position Effect In our lives, there are many situations in which we are required to remember lists of items. We are presented with situations as simple as remembering what we were supposed to buy at the grocery store to more complicated situations of having to memorize lists of vocabulary words in school in our everyday lives. Thus it is important to know and understand how we remember such things so we can effectively recall them when necessary. Typically, we are not required to remember the exact order or position in which items were presented when recalling them. According to Francis, Neath, MacKewn, & Goldthwaite (2004) this type of recall, in which "the order of the items is not required for accurate recall," is often termed free recall (pg. 60). However, many researchers have found that the likelihood of recalling items (such as words, letters, or numbers) does in fact depend on the items position in a list. This is often referred to as the serial position effect. The most common finding is that words at the beginning and end of the list are often easier and more accurately recalled than those words in the middle of the list. The improved recall for the words at the beginning of the list is often referred to as the primacy effect. Likewise, the improved recall of the words at the end of the list is referred to as the recency effect. Thus, when the results of a free recall experiment are plotted on a graph a u-shaped serial position curve is often formed. Many researchers have attempted to explain the serial position effect. A common explanation of the primacy and recency effects were introduced by Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968). According to this viewpoint the primacy effect is a result of the greater amount of attention and rehearsal allocated to the first few items on a list. This advantage in processing given to those items allows them to be transferred into the

References: Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. Psychology of learning and motivation: II, 249.  Francis, G., Neath, I., MacKewn, A., & Goldthwaite, D Glanzer, M., & Cunitz, A. R. (1966). Two storage mechanisms in free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 5, 351-360.  Postman, L., & Phillips, L Reed, S. K. (2004). Long-Term Memory. In Cognition Theory and Application (pp. 97-124). Belmont: Wadsworth.  Rundus, D Welch, G. B., & Burnett, C. T. (1924). Is Primacy a Factor in Association-Formation. American Journal of Psychology, 35, 396-401.   Table 1