Serial Position Effects in Free Recall

1. Serial Position Effects in Free Recall In a free recall task, you are given a list of words, one word at a time, and immediately afterwards you try to recall the words in any order. This is in contrast to serial learning, where you try to recall the words in the original order. Performance in free recall tasks has been interpreted as showing the effects of two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term.

2. Serial Position Effects in Free Recall Of particular interest is how many participants in the group get each item correct, starting with Item 1, then Item 2, then Item 3, and so on, in order, for all the items. For example, if there were 20 participants in the group, and 14 got Item 1 correct, the proportion who got it right would be 14/20 = .70. That’s like saying the probability of correctly recalling Item 1 was .70

3. Serial Position Effects in Free Recall Generally, there is a higher probability of recalling the items at the beginning and end of the list than the items in the middle. This is similar to the serial position curve for serial learning, which shows that most errors occur in the middle. To analyze free recall performance, a graph is made showing the probability of recalling an item as a function of its original serial position, even though it could be recalled in any position and still be considered correct.

4. Serial Position Effects in Free Recall 1.00 .50 .00 Theoretically, the primacy effect represents recall from long-term memory and the recency effect represents recall from short-term memory. Primacy Effect Probability of Recall Recency Effect 1 5 10 15 Serial Position of Item