They proposed that the primacy and recency effects were the products of long-term and short-term memory processes, respectively, and therefore the delay would have an impact only on the recency effect.
#Serial position effect serial#
Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) tested whether the interval between presentation of the word list and the recall task had an impact on the serial position curve. Such studies reveal the dynamic nature of the serial position effect under different conditions. Both the primacy and recency effect were also independent of the content of the word lists. The primacy and recency effect is therefore suppressed as the word list lengthens. For example, short word lists tend to increase the recall rate for middle words, such that the serial position effect curve as a whole moves upward along the vertical axis (Murdock, 1962).
The terms used to describe the differential ability to remember the first and last words is called the primacy and recency effects, respectively.Ī number of different variables can be used to influence the shape of the serial position effect curve. When a listener is given a word list of about a dozen or more words and is asked to recall them, they will tend to remember the first and last words better than the middle words thus the position of the words in the list determines how well the human mind is able to recall them. The serial position effect is a well-established phenomenon that reflects human memory processes (reviewed by Murdock, 1962). Impact of Distractor Task on Serial Position Effect Despite this limitation, these results confirm that a short delay impairs the recency effect by interfering with short-term memory.
This latter finding indicates the raw data should have been compared, rather than the item means. However, when the students t test was used on the item means for the two conditions, only the first four words were significantly different. The graphical presentation of the data is consistent with the findings of other researchers and reveals little impact on the primacy effect and a dramatic negative impact on the recency effect. To test this theory, a 17-item word list was presented to students at a rate of one word per second and half the students were allowed to immediately recall the words, while the other half counted backwards from 300 in threes for 30 seconds before recall. This theory also implies that if test subjects become preoccupied with an unrelated cognitive task in between word presentation and recall, the last words on the list would tend to be forgotten. This theory implies that lengthening the delay between presentation of the last words on the list would impair the recall of these words (recency effect), but not the first words presented (primacy effect). The serial position effect has been attributed to the labile nature of the short-term memory and the resilience of long-term memory.
¶ … Distractor Task on Serial Position Effect
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