Question

Explain the serial position effect and how it can be tested/demonstrated. In addition, explain the dichotic listening task and mention some of the typical findings.

Answer 1

• Experiments show that when participants are presented with a list of words, they tend to remember the first few and last few words and are more likely to forget those in the middle of the list.This is known as the serial position effect. The tendency to recall earlier words is called the primacy effect; the tendency to recall the later words is called the recency effect.
• A researcher can ask the participants to learn a list of words that varied in length from 10 to 40 words and free recall them. Each word will be presented for one to two seconds.It was found that the probability of recalling any word depended on its position in the list (its serial position). Words presented either early in the list or at the end were more often recalled, but the ones in the middle were more often forgotten. This is known as serial position effect.
• Dichotic listening refers to listening to different acoustic events presented to each ear simultaneously.Dichotic listening has been used for many purposes to understand the nature and capacities of selective attention.
• A dichotic-listening task requires the subject to shadow, or repeat aloud, a message presented to one ear while ignoring a message presented to the other ear.
• Early work using the dichotic listening paradigm revealed that subjects were very capable of successful shadowing and successful blocking. In fact, subjects are so successful at blocking the unattended message that little or no semantic content is ever reported from the irrelevant channel.
• One of the earliest researches in selective hearing was done by Colin Cherry in 1953. As an engineer, he wanted to build a machine that could filter out certain sounds while focusing on a particular signal.
• He conducted a dichotic listening test which played back two different messages at the same time to people, under a variety of conditions. This helped him discern how easily we could filter out what we wanted to hear. He named it "the cocktail party problem". This series of recordings also involved "shadowing" where the subject repeated words after hearing them from a recording.