Recency And Recall In Commercials

In the experiment conducted by W. Scott Terry, they set out to find out whether the placement of a commercial in a set of commercials would impact the ability for a person to recall the specific commercials and specific details from said commercials. They wanted to know whether there would be primacy or recency effect when recalling information. The serial position for the capability to recall the commercials under naturalistic conditions was an important factor for how people were able to recall information. For the first experiment, the subjects for the experiments were college students and they first viewed and had to attempt to recall 15 lists of commercials. Some lists were tested immediately after the viewing to make sure that commercials were firstly and efficiently processed. The design used was a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed factorial. The within-subjects factors were how long the commercial was and testing, which occurred immediately after list was presented or not. There were four lists of 15 commercials were constructed. Alternate sequences of each list was used to counterbalance to obtain more accurate results. Commercial length did not show any statistically significant effects when it came to memory testing, whether it be delayed for …show more content…
A single recognition test was given at the end of the program. The recognition test form intermixed the brand names of the 45 advertised products with 30 distractors. The results suggest that the absence of recency in delayed recall in Experiments 1 and 2 was not simply due to difficulties with retrieval. Individual participants might differ in their willingness to guess, which could distort estimates of remembering. In this study, the use of fewer distractors than targets might have generated a bias toward positive identifications. Overall these experiments showed that primacy effect was always there however the recency effect