In: Psychology
What do you learn from the two experiments (digit span and serial position effect)? What are some initial reactions to the results of these experiments?
The serial position and digit span experiments provide significant details about the phenonmena of working memory. The Serial positioning effect indicates that on a typical learning and memory experiment, after a brief presentation of each word one at a time, participants are most likely to recall of words which were in the beginning and towards the end of the list out of a list of given words. In other words, there is either a primacy effect( where individuals recall words that appear first in the memory) or a recently effect( words which are presented later). Moreover, it emerges that recall is maximum for the words in the end of the list than those in the beginning. This finding points towards the modal model of memory as per which the last words are easier to recall because they were already present in the short term memory and therefore can be easily retrieved from the short term memory. The primacy effect in learning points towards the fact that the beginning stimulus items got more time to be rehearsed and therefore got transferred to the Long term memory from which they could be easily remembered.
Miller’s experiments (1956) on memory further shows the capacity of memory to be 7+ or - 2. That is, Participants can hold up to 9 items from a list by using chunking to club larger pieces of information.