Introduction

Before the memory research conducted by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, little was known about the processes of memory and memory loss (Ebbinghaus and the Forgetting Curve 1). Ebbinghaus had a certain “fascination” with finding the causes of why people forget (Ebbinghaus 1). Ebbinghaus “helped move memory from a philosophical issue to a psychological issue when he developed a means to ‘measure numerically’ and ‘quantify’ the process” (1). For example, in his book Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, Ebbinghaus studied the storage of lists of items in short-term memory in order to further test the amount of maintenance rehearsal needed to encode the information into long-term memory (Chapter V 1-5). (* An example of one of his most famous discoveries can be found in Appendix A: Ebbinghaus Curve and Learner Retention).

Throughout his studies, Ebbinghaus dealt with the concept of serial position effect. First described by F.E. Niper in 1878, serial position effect can be defined as a “U-shaped relationship between a word’s position in a list and its probability of recall” (Serial Position Effect 2). In other words, serial position effect describes the tendency for people to remember items towards the beginning and end of a list rather than those items in the middle.

Explanation of the Topic

Several characteristics constitute the theory of serial position effect. First, the remembrance of items occurring towards the beginning of a list is referred to as primacy effect (Serial Position Effect 3). On the opposite end, remembering items at the end of a list is recency effect. Both of these effects have been empirically supported through hundreds of experiments and regardless of “whether lists are visually or verbally presented” (Knoedler, Hellwig, and Neath (1999) cited in Serial Position Effect 3). Finally, positional theory is the third characteristic that allows everything to fall into place.