MCAT® ExamPsychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of BehaviorHard
A cognitive psychologist conducts an experiment where participants are briefly shown a series of common objects (e.g., a chair, a table, a lamp) and then immediately asked to recall them. They find that participants tend to remember the first few items and the last few items in the list more accurately than the items in the middle. This phenomenon is known as the:
- AMisinformation effect
- BEncoding specificity principle
- CSerial position effect
- DSpreading activation
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Serial position effect
The serial position effect describes the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. This is further broken down into the primacy effect (remembering first items) and recency effect (remembering last items).
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The misinformation effect occurs when misleading information presented after an event alters a person's memory of the event.
- B. The encoding specificity principle states that memory is best when retrieval cues match cues present during encoding.
- D. Spreading activation is a model of memory in which activating one concept in a semantic network spreads activation to related concepts.
Serial Position Effect
The tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series most accurately, and the middle items least accurately.
- Comprises the primacy effect (better recall of early items)
- Comprises the recency effect (better recall of late items)
- Often observed in free recall tasks
- Suggests different memory processes for different parts of a list
Memory trick: Serial position: First and last, not the middle, fast.