Primacy

Primacy describes the notion that items towards the beginning of a list are rehearsed more than the other items (Rehearsal Hypothesis cited in Serial Position Effect 4.) Another explanation suggests that this higher rate of rehearsal transfers recollection of the items into secondary storage, which would then make the items easier to call (Theory of Serial Position Effect 1). These ideas root from the practice of maintenance rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal “is the continual repetition of a piece of information in order to hold it in current memory for use in problem solving or transferal to long-term memory” (Hawkins, Best, and Coney 347). Sound familiar? This was the major focus of Hermann Ebbinghaus’ memory research.

Recency

According to Waugh and Norman (1965) and Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), there are two locations in memory: short-term and long-term, and recency effect comes directly from short-term memory (Serial Position Effect 6). The idea of recency effect makes sense because after a subject is presented with a list and the list is removed from sight, the items towards the end of the list are usually remembered first (Welch and Burnett (1924) cited in Serial Position Effect 3). This foremost remembrance, according to the author of Theory of Serial Position Effect, occurs because there has been little or no decay of the items due to their most recent storage and non-interference with earlier items in the list (1).

Positional Theory

Positional theory “assumes order is stored by associating each element with its position in the sequence” (Henson 77). How are these positional codes “stored and retrieved from memory” (Henson 78)? As suggested by Brown, Preece, Hulme, Burgess, and Hitch, “the codes are derived from temporal oscillators in the brain. [Oscillating is the indecisive swaying ‘from one course of action or opinion to another’ (Costello, et al. 588, 886).] Elements can be associated with successive states of the oscillators, and these states reconstructed simply by resetting the oscillators” (Cited in Henson 78). Therefore, the successive state of each oscillators is improved through primacy and recency effect. Through the uses of primacy and recency effect, positional theory provides the evidence as to how these effects interact in memory to derive serial position effect.