The Serial Position Experiment (Essay Sample)

The Serial Position Experiment
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The Serial Position Experiment
Free recall is a basic paradigm to study the vitality of human attention and memory. In free recall, participants try to recall a list of provided items. In most cases, the results lead to serial positioning, where participants can remember the first and the last items best and the middle items worst (Murdock, 1962). The effect is a consequence of the primacy and the recency effect. The primacy effect refers to a situation where things that happen first are the most important because of their influence on what follows. The theory behind the idea is that there is a bit of processing in the first item, leading to greater cognition (Morrison et al., 2014). The recency effect is when items at the end of a sequence are easier to remember because of our working memory. A person's short-term memory, which is involved in processing conscious and immediate perceptual information, works to preserve these last items in a list.
Methods
One fills in their first and last name to start the experiment. Next, a pop-up window details instructions for the serial position experiment. There is a sequence of ten letters during the experiment, each appearing for about one second. After the presentation for the entire sequence, the buttons on the right become activated. You must click the buttons that correspond to the letters in the sequence without any particular order. The idea is to click on the letters you saw by clicking on the presented buttons. Notably, one cannot click on more than ten buttons, and it is only possible to click once for a specific alphabet.
Experimental Results
Results show that I was best at remembering the first letter of the sequence in the entire experiment, with a score of 93.3%. The second (80%), the fourth (80%), and the third letter (60.0%) follow it. I was worse at identifying the middle letters and worst in the last letters of the sequence. My free recall is a manifestation of the primacy effect. I can recall words at the beginning of the list best compared to the last ones.
Summary
The results align with my expectations due to my strategy in the experiment. I noticed that I concentrated more on the first letters, and due to the time limit, I had less time to master the middle and last alphabets. However, I captured most of the last items with a score of 53.3% for the ninth letter compared to 33.3% for the sixth