Primacy/ Recency Effect

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Introduction:

The aim of the study by B. Murdock (1962) was to find out if the position of the words on the list was having an effect on the easiest way to remembered.

B. Murdock have participants a number of words to remember and then he asked them to recall as many as they can remember, in any order.

The results shown that the first words to be recalled were those the P’c heard last (or the words that were last on the list) because they were stored in STM. Also P’c can remember the few first words that have being on the list because they were stored on the LTM.

Few words in the middle of the list were recalled, because they were not fully registered or remembered or there was lack of time to rehearse them.

The conclusion of that study is that the words on the beginning of the list and on the end of the list were more able to recall, because were stored in LTM than the words in the middle of the list because were stored in STM and there was lack of time to rehearse them.

Aim of my study is to carry out a partial replication of B. Murdock study.

 Hypothesis:

 

My hypothesis is to find out that if the P’c can remembered more words from the beginning and the end of the list than from the middle.

Introduction & Instructions for P’c:

Hello, my name is Marta.

Would you mind taking part of my psychology experiment?

This experiment involves you to listen carefully to the list of 20 words, then try to remember as many as you can, in no order. I will then give 5min for you to try to write them on a piece of paper, as many as you can, in any order.

Join now!

Do you understand what I want you to do?

Did you have any questions that you would like to ask me?

No-ones name would be used.

Thank you for taking part of my psychology experiment.

Debrief:

This experiment was done to find if there is any support for multistore model and primacy/ recency effect.

The recency effect is when you heard the last few words from the list you can remembered most because they were stored in short term memory.

The first words that you have heard from ...

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