Serial Position Curve - Murdock 1962

The main idea of Serial Position Curve is that participants get a list of words and are most likley to remember the very first and the very last words,instead of the once on the middle of the list. Remembering the very first  words is called the primary effect; the tendency to recall the later words is called the recency effect.

Murdock asked participants to learn words from a list and then recall it. There were about 10 to 40 words and each word was presented from one to two seconds. He suggested that words from the beginning of the list were put into long term memory (Primary Effect) because the person has time to repeat the word acoustically. Words from the end of the list went into short term memory (Recency Effect) and they can last in our brain for about 7 seconds.  Words from the middle of the list are much harder to remember because they had been there too long to be held in short term memory (STM) and not long enough to be put  in the long term memory.