Memory studies

Aim: To provide eveidence to support the multi-store explanation of memory.

Method: Participants had to learn a list of words presented one at a time, for two seconds per word, and then recall the words in any order.

Reuslts: The words at the end of the list were recalled first (known as the recency effect). Words from the beginning of the list were also recalled quite well (known as the primacy effect), but the middle words were not recalled very well at all.

Conclusion: Murdock concluded that this provides evidence for seperate short-term and long term stores. Murdock claimed that the recency effect is evidence that the last few words were still in the short-term store. The primacy effect is evidence that the first few words flowed into the long-term store.