Introduction
This research focused on identifying factors that may contribute to word recall. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether the self-reference effect (SRE), which refers to the relatability to a fact or event, and primacy, which refers to the tendency to remember things at the beginning, had a significant impact on students’ ability to recall words. The first study focused only on SRE, while the second assessed the primacy effect. In both studies, students were randomly assigned to scenarios in which they had to rank the number of adjectives referring to themselves or someone else.
While the first study had the same list of words in the same order for all the participants, the second study varied the order of words (positive adjective first vs. negative adjective first) to measure the effect of primacy. Both studies showed that the self-reference effect significantly increased the number of words remembered. In contrast, the second study demonstrated that primacy did not significantly affect the number of recollected words. The study’s results suggest that while SRE has a significant positive effect on memory, primacy has no significant effect on memory.
General Discussion
Due to the self-reference effect, it was initially predicted that participants who rated themselves would recall more words than participants in the other groups. The first study’s results supported this hypothesis, as the mean number of words recalled was significantly higher in the self-rated group than in the friend-rated and President-rated groups, indicating the significant impact of self-reference. Additionally, the first study predicted that participants in the self-rated group would have higher confidence scores in their recall than those in other groups because of the self-reference effect.
The second study’s results also supported this hypothesis, as participants in the President-rated group remembered significantly fewer words than those in the self-rated group. The second study had a different design from the first study, as it did not include a friend-rated group and instead explored the effect of another variable on recollection. Therefore, the robustness of the findings is confirmed by the fact that both studies arrived at the same conclusion despite the differences in methods.
The results of both studies are in accord with previous research. A study by Durbin et al. (2017) examines the effect of self-referential processing on item recognition and source memory, employing two experiments that utilize words and pictures. The study found that self-referentially encoded information was better recognized than non-self-referentially processed information.
Similarly, a study by Yin et al. (2019) examines the impact of self-referential processing on item and source memory in two experiments, focusing on spatial location and color as contextual cues. The study found that self-referential processing improved recollection of words and their spatial location, reduced source errors, and increased confidence in memory responses. Therefore, the results of this study are supported by previous research findings.
The second hypothesis was that participants from the groups with positive adjectives first would have a higher mean recollection score of positive words. In comparison, participants in the negative-first group would have a higher mean recollection score for negative words. In other words, the second study suggested that primacy would have a significant positive effect on students’ recollection ability. However, this supposition was not supported, which implies that no primacy effect was detected in the study. The results of this study contradict the findings of previous research.
A recent study by Marsh et al. (2019) examined the factors that influence memory and recollection, focusing specifically on the primacy and recency effects. The authors experimented to test the predictions of their framework, which involved manipulating the type of information presented and the presence of distractors. The results supported the framework’s predictions. They suggested that primacy and recency effects are influenced by various factors, including the type of information being presented, the sequence length, and the presence of distractors (Marsh et al., 2019). The authors concluded that their framework offers a comprehensive and flexible account of primacy and recency effects, which can explain the inconsistencies and gaps in previous research (Marsh et al., 2019). Therefore, further research is necessary to resolve this inconsistency.
Certain limitations, such as a small and homogeneous group of participants, may have affected the results of the present study. To broaden the generalizability of our findings, future studies should aim to recruit a larger and more diverse sample population. Additionally, the number of words that needed to be remembered may have been too low for primacy to have a significant effect. Therefore, it may be beneficial to increase the number of words that need to be remembered to ensure the robustness of the findings.
Conclusion
In general, memory is crucial for students, as they often need to remember a large amount of information quickly. Therefore, they need to know efficient strategies to help them remember things effectively. This study suggests that if students find a way to relate the material they need to remember to themselves, it can help them remember things effectively. Further research is needed to identify additional strategies that help students effectively remember information.
References
Durbin, K. A., Mitchell, K. J., & Johnson, M. K. (2017). Source memory that encoding was selfreferential: The influence of stimulus characteristics. Memory, 25(9), 1191-1200. Web.
Marsh, E. J., Butler, A. C., & Green, C. S. (2019). Primacy and recency effects in learning and memory: A review and experimental study. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 368–393. Web.
Yin, X., Ma, Y., Xu, X., & Yang, H. (2019). The effect of self-referencing on memory for different kinds of source information. Memory, 27(4), 519-527. Web.