Recency and Primacy Effect

A detailed Summary of Recency and Primacy Effect


Serial position effect refers to the difficulty of learning certain material as a function of its position in a list. The serial position curve is the U- shaped curve by which the results of the experiment are summarized. The serial position curve shows the parentage of words recalled at each of the 20 or more positions on the list. It was found in a typical memory experiment, that items at the beginning and end of the list recalled better than items from the middle portion of the list. The Serial Position curve revealed two effects, the recency effect and the primacy effect, which are fundamentally important pieces of evidence for the functional decomposition of "memory" into an organized set of subsystems. In this experiment the subjects had asked to listen to a list of twenty or more words. At the end of the list the subjects were given a minute or so to recall as many word as they could. The results of the experiment, whether the recency effect and/or the primacy effect toke place, were depended on the extant of the manipulation involved in


Results from previous memory tests shows a few effects, and recognized a few patterns in the way in which we remember things. The serial position effect is the tendency to have the most error in remembering the middle items from an ordered list (Coon, 1994). This effect leads us to the other two: the primacy effect and the recency effect. In addition, in the 1960's, manipulations involving the serial position curve were used to support the theory about the organization of memory and its two distinct structures: the short-term store and the long-term store.

Studies have shown that a manipulation in the experiment will alter the size of the recency or the primacy effect. Glanzer & Cunitz (1996) had participants count backwards for 30 seconds between the presentation of the list and the beginning of recall. Counting backwards caused the list items to drop out of the short-term store; as a result recall was based solely on long-tern memory. The counting backwards eliminated the recency effect, but had no effect at all on the primacy effect. By the

Some common words found in the essay are:
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