Primacy And Recency

The focus of this experiment was to compare the digit spans of children between the ages of four and twelve, as well as test for the primacy and recency effect with a word list task. Digit span is defined as the number of stimulus objects that can be remembered after a short time, and the primacy and recency effect occur when children tend to remember words towards the front and back of a word list. To compare digit spans, children were asked to remember and repeat a sequence of numbers in increasing digit increments, and to measure primacy and recency, children were read a list of words and asked to recall as many as possible in no particular order.
The experimental results suggest that the digit span task and the word list task were dependent
Primacy mainly affects long-term memory and the age differences in performance are most effectively clarified by the application of memory strategies in older children. On the other hand, recency mainly affects short-term memory and can be observed in all age groups with little developmental differences. From children ages four and older, the task of repeating words right after hearing them proves to be achievable with little to no difficulty (Ornstein & Naus, 1978; Ornstein, Naus, & Liberty, 1975). Through the results of the word list task, it also appeared that the seven to nine year olds and the ten to twelve year olds had a higher recollection for words in the vegetable category, specifically onion. However, the four to six year olds didn’t appear to have any consistent categorical clusters. This is because older children have the greater capability to group words into categories. If items can be grouped together, the amount of words recalled increases (Moely et al., 1969). I tested two participants ages nine and four. The nine-year-old did appear to group together and recall better stimulus items in the vegetable category, while the four-year-old didn’t show signs of categorizing at all. Categorical clusters can also explain the extra words some children falsely remembered, because in general, the extra words still fell under the categories actually mentioned on the list; such as potato for vegetable and car for vehicle. In one study on the topic of categorizing, students were asked to sort a group of unrelated pictures into categories. When asked to recall the images later on, the pictures that were categorically grouped had higher levels of recall (Best, 1993). With the emergence of metamemory, rehearsal, and categorizing,