Postman And Phillips Serial Position Effect Psychology

Postman And Phillips Serial Position Effect Psychology 4,3/5 9163votes
Postman And Phillips Serial Position Effect Psychology

An experimental study of short-term memory for lists of familiar English words is reported. Lists of 10, 20, and 30 unrelated words were presented at a 1-sec. Retention was measured by free recall after intervals of 0, 15 and 30 sec. A counting task was used to prevent rehearsal during the retention interval. The absolute level of recall increased with length of list whereas the percentages retained showed the reverse trend.

Variables on STS and LTS. Examination of the serial position curves shows that all of these variables produced systematic differ- ential effects across the serial positions. Delay had its effect wholly on the end peak of the serial position curve as in preceding studies. (Glanzer & Cunitz, 1966; Postman & Phillips.

The recall scores decreased steadily as a function of retention interval, with the rates of forgetting comparable for the three lengths of list. The decline in the amount recalled was due in large measure to the loss of the terminal items in the list.

Free Download Kamus Inggris Indonesia Untuk Hp Android on this page. Consequently, the pronounced recency effect present on the immediate test of recall was progressively reduced as a function of time. By contrast retention of the initial part of the list was relatively stable.

These variations in rate of forgetting are attributed to differences among serial positions in susceptibility to proactive inhibition.

Free recall is a basic paradigm that has long been used to study human memory, and which was central to the verbal learning tradition in early cognitive psychology (e.g. Glanzer & Cunitz, 1966; Murdock, 1962; Postman & Phillips, 1965).

In a free recall task, a subject is presented a list of to-be-remembered items, one at at time. For example, an experimenter might read a list of 20 words aloud, presenting a new word to the subject every 4 seconds. At the end of the presentation of the list, the subject is asked to recall the items (e.g., by writing down as many items from the list as possible). It is called a free recall task because the subject is free to recall the items in any order that he or she desires. The free recall task is of interest to cognitive science because it provided some of the basic information used to decompose the mental state term 'memory' into simpler subfunctions ('primary memory', 'secondary memory'). This is because the results of a free recall task were typically plotted as a serial position curve. This curve exhibited a recency effect and a primacy effect.

The behavior of these two effects provided support to the hypothesis that the free recall task called upon both a short-term and a long-term memory. References: • Glanzer, M., & Cunitz, A. Two storage mechanisms in free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5(4), 351-360. • Murdock, BB (1962). 'The serial position effect of free recall'. Psychological Review, 65, 482–488.

• Postman, L., & Phillips, L. Short-term temporal changes in free recall. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 17, 132-138. (Revised April 2010). Windows 7 Vienna Download.