A serial position effect in recall of United States presidents. Roediger, H. L. & Crowder, R. G. Bull Psychon Soc, 8(4):275-278, 1976.
abstract   bibtex   
Requested 159 college students to recall the names of all the US presidents, in either chronological or any order. Data analysis produced a classical serial position curve with best performance at the beginning and end of the series. Except for extraordinarily high recall of Lincoln, memorability of presidents was strongly related to their chronological position in history. Results extend generality of the serial position effect to semantic memory and, if one seeks a general explanation of serial position effects in semantic and long-term episodic memory experiments, rules out several theoretical candidates. It appears most congruent with the hypothesis that end points of a series serve as distinct positional cues around which memory search is begun.
@Article{Roediger1976,
  author    = {Roediger, Henry L. and Crowder, Robert G.},
  journal   = {Bull Psychon Soc},
  title     = {A serial position effect in recall of United States presidents.},
  year      = {1976},
  number    = {4},
  pages     = {275-278},
  volume    = {8},
  abstract  = {Requested 159 college students to recall the names of all the US presidents,
	in either chronological or any order. Data analysis produced a classical
	serial position curve with best performance at the beginning and
	end of the series. Except for extraordinarily high recall of Lincoln,
	memorability of presidents was strongly related to their chronological
	position in history. Results extend generality of the serial position
	effect to semantic memory and, if one seeks a general explanation
	of serial position effects in semantic and long-term episodic memory
	experiments, rules out several theoretical candidates. It appears
	most congruent with the hypothesis that end points of a series serve
	as distinct positional cues around which memory search is begun.},
  timestamp = {2012.12.18},
}

Downloads: 0