Primacy and recency effect essay

Definition of primacy effect The primacy effect describes the situation when after a reading of long list of items, the person is more likely to remember the first few items of the list than later lists parts. There is an investigation of this phenomenon: participants observe a list of words by the fixed period. Later they are asked to recall as many as possible words from the list. As a result, participants recall words from the beginning of the list more often that they remember words from later parts of the list. Actually, this phenomenon explains that a human has two different systems of memory: a short-term store and a long-term store. So why we remember the words from the first part of list better than other words? During the research, it was found that first words are repeated more often compared to others. When we repeat an item more often, it activates a long-term memory, so we get a better chance to remember this item, compared with other items that were repeated less often. The primacy effect can be found when people watch a TV commercial: when participants were watching a TV program that was interrupted by commercials, they recalled first three commercials better than those that was showed later in the block. Definition of recency effect The recency effect is a phenomenon that shows we can better remember the more recent information much better than all information that was presented earlier. We can investigate how this effect affects our impressions. For example, if to describe a person with three negative characteristics followed by three positive characteristics, this person would be estimated more positively than if we describe a person by the same characteristics that put in opposite way (at start positive characteristics and then negative). Needless to say that for us its more simple to remember more recent information: according to many studies, people better recall the nearest past events compared to remote past events. There are two factors that affect the appearance and intensity of recency effects: 1) task factor — means how the current task was structured and represented to participants of research; 2) processing factor — how participants process the information theyve got. The primacy and the recency effects are the opposite things that have an important value in many investigations of human memory processes.