Primacy & Recency Effects in Recall (AQA GCSE Psychology)

The effects of serial position

• Serial position effect refers to the tendency for people to:

  • recall items which appear at the beginning of a list (primacy effect)

  • recall items which appear at the end of a list (recency effect)

  • forget items which appear in the middle of a list

• The position of an item (e.g. a word or a digit) will determine whether or not that item is recalled, particularly if the list is longer than 9 items (the capacity of STM is 5-9 items)

• Serial position effect operates as follows:

  • items at the beginning of a list have been rehearsed and so are easily recalled as they have been transferred to LTM

  • items at the end of a list are easily recalled as they are still in STM

  • items in the middle of a list have been pushed out of STM by the next items and have not been rehearsed therefore they are displaced and are not easily recalled

• The serial position ‘curve’ graphically shows both primacy and recency effects.

Murdock’s serial position curve study

• Murdock (1962) conducted a lab experiment into serial position effect as follows:

  • 103 participants (Psychology students) who took part in several trials of the experiment in groups

  • The participants listened to 20-word lists, incorporating some of the most common words in the English language

    • The word lists were any length from 10 - 40 words

  • The participant was asked to use free recall (recalling the words in any order) once they had heard each list

  • The results showed that the first and the last words on every list were the most easily recalled i.e. the classic serial position curve

  • In short, there was clear evidence of a primacy and a recency effect for each word list participants were given

  • Murdock concluded that serial position effect occurs when a list of words is recalled, with recency effect being the stronger of the two effects shown

• Serial position effect studies give support to the multi-store model of memory as they provide evidence for two separate storage systems for STM and LTM

Evaluation of primacy & recency effects in recall

Strengths

• Murdock’s study used a standardised procedure in controlled conditions which makes it high in reliability

• The use of several different trials and different-length word lists means that Murdock was able to repeatedly test serial position effect across the study which gives it good internal validity

Weaknesses

• Memorising word lists is an artificial task which means that the study lacks ecological validity

• The use of Psychology students as participants is problematic because: it is an unrepresentative sample which cannot be easily generalised there is more likelihood of the participants guessing the aim of the experiment if they are familiar with psychological theories