Familiar Face?

Background

Serial position effects are pervasive in memory research; the recency effect tends to take the spotlight while the primacy effect is commonly dismissed as the product of strategy. Recent recognition memory research has discovered a larger primacy effect with increased delay before testing, which doesn't corroborate with established explanations of the effect. There have been failed attempts to replicate this effect, and further investigation is necessary to understand if the primacy effect may deserve more of the spotlight and possess some intrinsic encoding strength that is unacknowledged in the literature.

Research Questions / Hypotheses

To investigate if memory performance on the first serial position of a recognition task is significantly larger than chance with an increased retention interval.

Participants

A total 59 participants have currently completed this experiment.

Methods

Participants completed a series of computerised memory trials. Each trial consisted of participants being presented with four faces, and then either a novel face or face from the set as a test item. Participants were required to state if the test item was 'old' or 'new'.

Results

We plan to compare the differences between conditions using simple statistical analyses, such as ANOVA, and potentially more complex computational modelling if we obtain sufficiently high-quality data.

Implications

If the study replicates the finding of a larger primacy effect with increasing retention intervals, this provides support for further research investigating the cognitive complexity of this effect. Depending on the quality of the data obtained, we may wish to publish our findings in a journal article.