Home Page
Muller-Lyer Illusion
Confusing the lengths of arrows.
Lexical Decision Task
Recognising words.
Serial Position Curve
A memory experiment.
Back
to Illusions & Experiments.
|
|
|
Serial Position Curve
Online Experiment
Your task is to say each digit out loud as they appear, then click on the digits in the order you think you saw them.
You will have five trials like this.
The Experiment
The Explanation
It has widely been accepted that we can only remember a limited number of items from a list that exceeds about seven items.
Previous experiments have shown that over a set of trials, a clear effect appears, known as a Serial Position Curve.
You should find that the first items and the last items are remembered more accurately than the items in the middle of the list.
The most commonly accepted explanation for this effect is that early items in the list have no interference from preceding items.
The advantage for the final items is attributed to their presence in short-term memory.
|
|
