Serial Positioning Effect referred to the tendency of human being to be able to recall first and last thing from a set of various things placed in series.
Suppose there are ten persons standing in a series and each of the thdm states his/her name to you, one after another. In such events, you being a listener, would be able to recall the names of first person and last person in the series in a relatively faster and easier manner.
Let us see how Serial Positioning Effect distinguishes Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory with the help of the above example.
LONG TERM MEMORY
The tendency by virtue of which you could recall the first heard name easily is associated with a term called Primacy Effect.
The primacy effect discusses that items that are presented in the beginning of the series (1st,2nd or 3rd items) are most effectively saved in a logical section of memory called as Long Term Memory (LTM) because of the high processing effort applied on them.
SHORT TERM MEMORY
The tendency because of which, you could easily recall the last heard name is associated with a term called Recency Effect.
The recency effect emphasizes on those items that are presented at the end of the series like penultimate and the final positions. It states that human brain devotes relatively less effort to store most recently faced things, and hence, such type of information is saved in a logical section of memory called as Short Term Memory (STM).
As evident now, Serial positioning effect describes and distinguishes LTM and STM in terms of Primacy and Recency effect.
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What does the serial position effect tell us about the difference between short term memory and...