Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Primacy-Recency Effect
Primacy-Recency Effect
Effect
By: Claire Wetta and
Larissa Vasquez
Experiment
The primacy-recency effect was first tested by Bennet Murdock in 1962
A list of 40 words were read
Participants had to recall as many as possible within a reasonable amount of
time
Their total was added and then broken down by word
Results
Murdock found that nearly half of the people he tested it on were able to
remember the last four words he had said, therefore recency
Words listed at the beginning of the list were also recalled well because they
were put into LTM instead of STM, the primacy effect
1. Fairy
29
27
2. Acorn
3. Jam
27
25
21
4. Drown
5. Noodle
22
16
18
6. Lamp
7. Hotel
8. Cloud
9
10
___________________________________________________
11. Essay
12
12. Ink
13. Onion
10
14. Bargain
15. Kangaroo
17
16. Moon
18
17. Tree
29
18. Snail
32
19. Queen
34
20. Good
35
________________________________________________
Our Results
In our experiment we found that our results had mirrored Murdocks and
found the Primacy-Recency Effect proved true.