Serial position effect



The serial position effect refers to how items at the beginning of a list are the easiest to recall, followed by the items near the end of a list. Items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.

This effect can be thought of as a combination of the recency effect and primacy effect, as well as the Von Restorff effect (assuming that the beginning and ends of a list stand out cognitively). According to the time-of-day effect, the relative strength of primacy and recency may differ by the time of day.

Some have suggested that this effect could be applied to learning by placing the most difficult items to learn sequentially at the beginning and end, it's also well known by TV advertisers that placing a commercial at the beginning or end of a commercial block will yield the best results.

One suggested reason for this effect is that the first third of the objects remembered presented are those who could be taken into the long-term memory effectively by mnemonics, while the last third were the ones who still were present in the Short-term memory, the intermediate third, not being taken into either of the memories thus shows a decline in performance. This was demonstrated in 1966 when an experiment was conducted where two groups were to recall 15 words presented to them. The control group was allowed to recall the words immediately after they had been presented to them, the result was a normal serial position graph (see diagram). The experimental group, on the other hand was allowed to answer after a 30 seconds, this caused the recency effect to diminish due to Short-term memory decay.