The Primacy Effect

Memory is divided into three categories. These categories consist of: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory, out of these short term memory is the main focus in this essay. It has been widely researched due to interest of how much memory can be stored, how long this memory can be stored for and what information is memorised.

In Chapter 7 of our What Is Psychology textbook, we learned about the importance, details and strategies of memory techniques. One type of memory is Short Term, which only last up to thirty seconds before forgetting. Whenever has to remember a number or a name, they often repeat the information multiple times so that the Short Term Memory can transition into Long Term Memory. In order for this transition to occur, the information must be constantly repeated, or important enough to be held in the permanent memory, which helps create a “folder” with all retaining information and reminiscing. Another way short term can become long term is using a method called Chunking, this breaks the bigger pictures into smaller ones for the brain to remember,

Memory span is a measure of short term memory and its capacity through the use of a list. Participants are asked to review a list of items, retain, and immediately recall as accurate as possible. The list may be conducted with a random list of numbers, words, or letters since these items may influence differently amongst each participant. The list is also varied in item length to test in which particular length the participant is subject to make the least of errors and determine their memory span. The average short-term memory capacity is ranged

There is substantial research backing this model. For example Murdock (1962) found the serial position effect which shows when presented with a list of items, participants recalled those shown at the beginning (primary) and those at the end (recency);

Memory is a set of cognitive processes that allow us to remember past information (retrospective memory) and future obligations (prospective memory) so we can navigate our lives. The strength of our memory can be influenced by the connections we make through different cognitive faculties as well as by the amount of time we spend devoting to learning specific material across different points in time. New memories are created every time we remember specific event, which results in retrospective memories changing over time. Memory recall can be affected retrospectively such as seeing increased recall in the presence of contextual cues or false recall of information following leading questions. Memory also includes the process

ever mission is assigned" (Madigan 1998, 24). This assessment found in his study of the

Short term memory refers to a memory system that stores a limited amount of information in conscious awareness for a brief period of time, (McLeod, 2007). Short term memory is integral to cognitive activities such as reading, comprehension & problem solving & language as without it we would be unable to recall the beginning of a sentence by the time we reach the end of it, nor e.g. perform simple mental mathematical calculations (Hedden,et al, 2004). Interestingly because language , reading and problem solving occur sequentially (Hedden,et al, 2004) , information stored in short term memory is stored and retrieved sequentially.( McLeod, 2007) for example, when asked to recall the 3rd digit in a numeric sequence, one would go through the sequence in the order that it was heard in order to retrieve the 3rd digit in a numerical sequence, one would go through the sequence in the order that it was heard to retrieve the 3rd digit.

According to the article of “The Great Affluence Fallacy,” the author states the importance of communication and the coexistence between society. Isolating ourselves proves to create depression, as a matter of fact, it can also result to be unhealthy. The author provides several great examples of how our culture use to be more communal and how over the years that has changed.

There are times when doing the right thing can lead to bad consequences. For example, if your family is about to be killed by a criminal and the only thing you can do to protect your family from being murdered is to kill the person who is threatening them, you would feel it necessary to commit an evil in order to prevent a greater misfortune. On the other hand, the actor in cases such as this faces a moral dilemma of having to kill someone. This is where the Doctrine of Double Effect comes into play. The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is a principal which aims to provide specific guidelines for determining when it is morally permissible to perform an action in the pursuit of a positive outcome with the full knowledge that the action will also bring about an evil consequence. (Solomon, 2014). Although the Doctrine of Double Effect is viewed as a positive theory by man, it is unjust in that it gives people a justification to commit heinous acts if they merely claim that they intended some sort of good outcome to result from their actions.

The sixth patient also belongs to a family and has dreams that are to be achieved. Causing preventable death to such an individual does not only cause pain to the family but it is also an injustice and an unfair way of ending life. It is logical to save five lives by eliminating one but it is morally right to save them all. There are other ways of getting organs for

After a new memory is learnt, it enters the process of encoding during which the memory is labile and capable of disruption until it becomes stabilised over a period of time (Nader & Einarsson, 2010; Nader et al, 2000). This process is called consolidation and originally consisted of the theory that once stabilised in the brain, it remains fixed (Suzuki et al, 2004). This theory has been rebutted by the acceptance of reconsolidation, a theory that imposes the ideology that when memories are retrieved, through similar experiences (Lee, 2009), they become labile until,

The primacy effect is a memory theory that claims items presented in the beginning of a series are more easily remembered than items presented later in the series. The primacy effect is mostly associated with short-term memory recall and has the greatest effect when there is no delay between the different pieces of given information (Straker, 2011). The primacy effect results from a cognitive bias that states items presented at the beginning of a sequential presentation are more easily remembered because at that time, the brain is more attentive and has fewer items to process, allowing them to be better stored and later recalled more easily (Weidman, 2016).

Memory is defined as "the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information." Our memory can be compared to a computer's information processing system. To remember an event we need to get information into our brain which is encoding, store the information and then be able to retrieve it. The three-stage processing model of Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin suggests that we record information that we want to remember first as a fleeting sensory memory and then it is processed into a short term memory bin where we encode it ( pay attention to encode important or novel stimuli) for long-term memory and later retrieval. The premise for the three step process is that we are unable to focus on too much

Interference of other material also plays a role in the short-term forgetfulness. It is hard for the brain to focus on committing more than one thing memory at a time. The old stuff is bumped out by the new stuff, which is a big contributor to why you forget. Our short-term memory seems to have a limited amount of places to hold this temporary data. This is an area that has been studied a lot. There are different theories about how much we actually retain before it is pushed out by the next thought. Chunking makes remembering easier as well. It involves grouping information into familiar stimuli so it can be stored as a single unit. This takes up fewer memory slots and makes remembering smoother. The chunks are effective when they are associated with something familiar to the individual. This ties into the long-term memory because that is where you draw the familiarity.

Theoretically, the primacy effect represents recall from long-term memory and the recency effect represent recall from short-term memory (Ashcraft, 2010). In general, people will have better memories for recency effect than primacy effect. However, if people recall the first few items first, then the primacy effect will be greater than the recency effect. Thus it is important to know and understand how we remember such things so we can effectively recall them when necessary. Typically, we are not required to remember the exact order or position in which items were presented when recalling them. Stigler reported that a physicist Francis Nipher has first documented the serial position effect when he noted that he was better able to remember the first few and last few graphs and figures that were presented in a physics paper. Therefore, the initial observations on serial position effect may be owing to metacogitive judgment about the recallability of items in a series (Castel, 2008).