AP PSYCHOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -The serial position effect reveals that recall of a supraspan list of words follows a predictable pattern, whereby words at the beginning (primacy) and end (recency) of a list are recalled more easily than words in the middle.

Detailed explanation-2: -Items in the middle of a series are harder to remember because they are no longer in our short-term memory, but they haven’t been processed for long enough to be stored in our long-term memory.

Detailed explanation-3: -Experiments show that when participants are presented with a list of words, they tend to remember the first few and last few words and are more likely to forget those in the middle of the list. This is known as the serial position effect.

Detailed explanation-4: -The serial position effect refers to the tendency to be able to better recall the first and last items on a list than the middle items. Psychology Hermann Ebbinghaus noted during his research that his ability to remember the items on a list depended on the position of the item on the list.

Detailed explanation-5: -For example, if a person creates a long grocery list, the serial position effect means that they will likely remember the first and last few items on the grocery list, but will have trouble remembering what is in the middle.