The Primacy Effect

The first being the subjects both read off a computer screen which increased the likelihood for distraction because there weren’t just the words to look at. Also in an exercise testing memory, people will always use some method or tactic to remember words for example relating words to surroundings or well-known items. For example, subject A remembers dog because she owns one and calculates because she was doing her maths homework within the hour before the recall. Subject B, on the other hand, noticed that the words dog and odd kind of rhymed so remembered

In the last half century several theories have emerged with regard to the best model for human memory. In each of these models there was a specific way to help people recall words and

This experiment is based on previous research done. For example, in 1969, in a research by Bower and Clark, no difference in the immediate recall scores of both groups was noted, but when later asked to recall, those who used narrative chaining recalled an average of 93% of the words compared to the control group which only recalled an average of 13% of words. In another experiment, participants who used narrative chaining remembered six times more information than participants who learned by simply repeating the words to themselves (Loftus, 1980). Narrative chaining is particularly useful when a person wants to remember information in a particular order. The aim of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of narrative chaining on memory. It is hypothesized that in a group of 59 participants aged 10-69 years old, participants who use narrative chaining to remember a list of words will remember a higher number and percentage of words when asked to write down as many words as possible through serial recall compared to participants who use maintenance rehearsal.

* Levels of processing theory- proposes that deeper levels of processing results in us remembering information for a longer period of time

Explain why do you think your memory span is highest for the item you found is highest as compared with the other items.(10 points)

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);

74. Raymond remembers, “When I was a sophomore, I took the hardest physics test of my life, and I was happy with my C.” This memory represents a(n)

memory: every time you read look for comparisons, and ask yourself, “Where have I seen this before?”

The results of Roediger and McDermott’s experiment were very significant. The participants recalled the critical distractor words 40% of the time compared to 14% recall of the normal distractor words. When they

Ullsperger, Bylsma, and Botvinick (2005) investigated whether the findings of Mayr, Awh, and Laurey (2003) can be replicated and how much they can be shown across different task performances. Their specific study was motivated by a prior experiment where Gratton, Coles, and Donchin (1992) found that after an incompatible type trial reaction times were reduced and target processing occurred more frequently than flanker processing on the next trial. Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, and Cohen (2001) believed that this follows the conflict monitoring hypothesis where incompatible trials involve a conflict with the response leading to greater top-down information processing (Botvinick, Nystrom, Fissell, Carter, & Cohen, 1999). However, Mayr et. al (2003) argued that the congruency sequence effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) was due to repetition priming because of stimulus repeats in a flanker task. This may have led to a faster reaction time with repeated trials. Mayr et al. (2003) used two experiments to present evidence for their argument. Both experiments failed to show the effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) when target and stimulus items did not repeat from trial to trial.

The current study was created to retest reproducibility of Slamecka and Graf results about participants remembering words better when they generated the words than when they read the words in a sample of undergraduate students at Texas A&M University (Slamecka and Graf, 1978). Nineteen undergraduate students at Texas A&M University participated in an experiment where one group was given a set of words and were told to memorize the words. The other group was given one word and the first letter of the second word and was told to generate the second word. It was hypothesized that the group with the participants who generated the second word would remember those sets of words better than the other group. Results showed that the group who generated the second word significantly memorized the words better, the p value being < .05. More in depth explanations involving more variables are discussed such as the five rules, or the within subjects, and their effect on the generation effect as well as future directions.

If it has been identified that the central route of persuasion on an audience is necessary due to high relevance to the persuasive message, this gives the persuader a framework to begin crafting a strong argument. Since relevance is what captures the audience’s attention, the persuader must exploit this. For example, if the persuader is attempting to sell a car to an individual the the use of the central route, and the potential buyer has been categorized as one that clearly understands the relevance of the purchase, the persuader should do his or her best to make their product seem the most relevant to the customer. The seller may do this by asking the customer to visualize how happy they will be in their new car. This can also be done by highlighting the features of the car that are most applicable to the customer’s concerns (safety, high gas mileage, etc). These methods will invite the receiver to become more involved with the target of persuasion. All of these ways utilize the customer’s judgment of high relevance to the situation to construct a strong argument.

This study is a conceptualized replication of the Howes and Solomon (1951) experiment investigating word accuracy and word frequency in short duration trials. It is hypothesized that words that appear more often in printed text (easier to access in the lexicon) will be more accurately identified rather than words that appear less commonly. A total of 83 participants in the study were presented with words taken from the Throndike-Lorge database. The words were presented for one second with a six second rest in the middle. This was done sixty times and the results suggest a moderate strong relationship between word accuracy and frequency. Though there are multiple factors that may have influenced these results.

Prior to the early 1970s the prominent idea of how memories were formed and retrieved revolved around the idea of processing memory into specific stores (Francis & Neath, 2014). These memory stores were identified as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. In contrast to this idea, two researchers named Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed an idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval (Goldstein, 2015). This idea is known as the levels of processing theory. According to this theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that a given item is received by an individual (Goldstein, 2015). Craik and Lockhart stressed four points in supporting their theory. First, they argued that memory was the result of a series of analyses, each level of the series forming a deeper level of processing than the preceding level (Francis & Neath, 2014). The shallow levels of processing were believed to hold less importance and are defined as giving little attention to meaning of an item. Examples of which include focusing on how a word sounds or memorizing a phone number by repeating it over and over again (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The deeper levels processing involve paying close attention to the meaning of an item and relating that meaning to something else, an example of which would be focusing on the meaning of a word rather than just how the word sounds (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The second point Craik and Lockhart

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).