Long Term Memory Recency Effect
Abstract
This report is designed to investigate the short term memory & the recency effect alongside the long term memory & the primacy effect. A task of recalling two sets of words (unrelated and related) were used and a sample of 20 mixed (M & F) psychology students in a within subject design. The data was collected and interpreted on a graph and the results show that the primacy and the recency effect, which supports the idea of two separate stores.
Introduction
This report will discuss an experiment to study the relationship of short-term memory and long-term memory of related words and unrelated words. Everyone has different capabilities within memory, some people have a good short term memory and bad long term memory …show more content…
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1970) first defined memory into 3 different memory systems; sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory. Sensory memory has a large capacity but most information fades too quickly to be processed (Sperling 1960). Short term memory has a quite quick input and retrieval and has a span of approximately seven items, plus or minus two (Miller 1965). Lastly, long term memory is the long lasting memory system which has limitless capabilities but takes longer to recover and to store (Baddely 1990). In short term memory, it is known that there is both primacy and recency effects. The primacy effect is when items at the start of the list are remembered compared to the items from the middle and the recency effect is where items at the end are better remembered. It …show more content…
They also show that its easier to recall if they are related or like Morris et al (1985) showed that with previous knowledge of football, it was them who performed better at short term memory recall of football scores. Which suggests that long term memory can influence the performance of short term memory.
Conclusion
The experiment started by reading a list of 14 unrelated words and then given two minutes to recall as many as possible followed by a list of 14 related words and then to recall as many as possible in two minutes. Results were gathered using the QVR Application
On the basis of this experiment, the results support the theory that the primacy effect and the recency effect do exist and it is easier to remember words at the start and at the end of the list.
This study could have benefitted from a larger sample size and maybe look at a wider demographic by including not just undergraduate students and to have a broader age range.
This experiment could have been expanded to maybe include different sets of words (e.g. connected by colour, word arrangement or even pictures). Other things that could have been changed was the way the experiment was carried out (classroom environment and not full attention being
This report is designed to investigate the short term memory & the recency effect alongside the long term memory & the primacy effect. A task of recalling two sets of words (unrelated and related) were used and a sample of 20 mixed (M & F) psychology students in a within subject design. The data was collected and interpreted on a graph and the results show that the primacy and the recency effect, which supports the idea of two separate stores.
Introduction
This report will discuss an experiment to study the relationship of short-term memory and long-term memory of related words and unrelated words. Everyone has different capabilities within memory, some people have a good short term memory and bad long term memory …show more content…
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1970) first defined memory into 3 different memory systems; sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory. Sensory memory has a large capacity but most information fades too quickly to be processed (Sperling 1960). Short term memory has a quite quick input and retrieval and has a span of approximately seven items, plus or minus two (Miller 1965). Lastly, long term memory is the long lasting memory system which has limitless capabilities but takes longer to recover and to store (Baddely 1990). In short term memory, it is known that there is both primacy and recency effects. The primacy effect is when items at the start of the list are remembered compared to the items from the middle and the recency effect is where items at the end are better remembered. It …show more content…
They also show that its easier to recall if they are related or like Morris et al (1985) showed that with previous knowledge of football, it was them who performed better at short term memory recall of football scores. Which suggests that long term memory can influence the performance of short term memory.
Conclusion
The experiment started by reading a list of 14 unrelated words and then given two minutes to recall as many as possible followed by a list of 14 related words and then to recall as many as possible in two minutes. Results were gathered using the QVR Application
On the basis of this experiment, the results support the theory that the primacy effect and the recency effect do exist and it is easier to remember words at the start and at the end of the list.
This study could have benefitted from a larger sample size and maybe look at a wider demographic by including not just undergraduate students and to have a broader age range.
This experiment could have been expanded to maybe include different sets of words (e.g. connected by colour, word arrangement or even pictures). Other things that could have been changed was the way the experiment was carried out (classroom environment and not full attention being