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Serial position effect — MRCPsych Paper A MCQ

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ModeratePsychologySerial position effectMRCPsych Paper A

A participant hears a fixed sequence of 20 unrelated words and is then asked to recall them in any order. During immediate recall, words from the beginning and end are recalled better than words from the middle. When the participant instead counts backwards for 30 seconds before recall, the advantage for the final words is markedly reduced while the advantage for the initial words remains. Which psychological phenomenon best accounts for this pattern?

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Correct answer: A — Serial position effect

The correct answer is **E, serial position effect**. Recall is typically better for items at the beginning of a list (the primacy effect) and at the end (the recency effect) than for middle items. Primacy is associated with greater rehearsal and more durable encoding, whereas a filled delay such as backward counting disrupts maintenance of the most recent items and therefore reduces recency. Proactive interference is disruption of new learning by earlier material. Encoding specificity concerns matching cues at learning and retrieval. Semantic clustering involves grouping related material, which is not supported because the words are unrelated. The von Restorff effect is enhanced recall of a single distinctive item rather than both ends of a list.

Reference: Weitzner DS, Calamia M. Serial position effects on list learning tasks in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Neuropsychology. 2020;34(4):467–478. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31999168/