An overview of how serial positioning affects the storage of information in the short-term memory and transfer to long-term memory.
This week’s course and text readings offered an overview of how serial positioning affects the storage of information in the short-term memory and transfer to long-term memory. The key determinants of people’s ability to remember the details at hand include the primary effect, the recency effect, and the Von Restorff effect. This paper offers a summary of articles and their link to this week’s readings. Bireta et al. examine the presence of serial function in the implicit memory. On the other hand, Dimsdale-Zucker et al. (2019) investigate the role of serial positioning in the occurrence of false memory. The studies confirm that serial position can positively or negatively impact human memory since it can improve knowledge retention abilities or trigger false memories.
In the article “Distinctiveness and serial position functions in implicit memory,” Bireta et al. (2018) perform two experiments to investigate the presence of serial position functions in implicit memory. The first experiment entails allowing 60 undergraduates from the Memorial University of Newfoundland and the College of New Jersey to view four words in distinct colors, after which the authors performed a test of order. The second experiment reversed the order of the first trial. The findings indicate that serial position functions exist in implicit memory and support the distinctiveness effect (Bireta et al., 2018). This study indicates that serial position impacts different parts of human memory. It also has significant influence on the implicit or subconscious memory. As such, certain details are stored automatically in the brain. Based on the results distinctiveness is a major determinant of how knowledge is stored in the implicit memory.
Dimsdale-Zucker et al. (2019) determined whether false memory effects have significant correlations with serial position. The authors also perform two experiments to determine whether serial position has any contributions in the development of false memory. The first experiment involved engaging 52 undergraduate students from the University of Michigan in reading tasks. The authors reorganized the activities during the second experiment. The findings indicate that the subjects recalled an average of 8.18 words during each trial. However, 7-10 of the words were correct responses while the rest were wrong (Dimsdale-Zucker et al., 2019). Thus, incorrect words represent false memory. The results suggest that there is immediacy of false recognition whereby verbatim features and gist-based cures influence memory regarding primacy and recency elements.
The two articles demonstrate the impacts of serial position from different perspectives that were studied in the course readings. They include the primacy, recency, and distinctiveness effects. In addition to positive impacts such as increased ability to remember unique, recent, or initial details, serial positioning can also negatively influence a person’s memory (Dimsdale-Zucker et al., 2019). For instance, students in the second article offered incorrect answers due to the existence of false memory impacts.
Serial positioning has both positive and negative impacts on how human memory operates. The aspects of recency, distinctiveness, and primacy effects can improve people’s ability to store more information in the short-term and implicit memories. However, it can also have adverse impacts on learning outcomes if the false memory impact is considerable. Thus, future researchers can examine the actual link between false memory and serial position to help in the development of strategies for neutralizing its impacts on learning results.