Research Form

Name: Connor Vermillion & Dylan Saunders

Topic: Primacy/Recency Effect
Experimental Research: What has been done similar? And how will it impact your
experiment? (Cite the works you get ideas from)
Peterson and Peterson performed an experiment where participants had to remember
series of three letter word combination. This is similar to our idea because were going to
have people look at a list of words and see how many words they can remember. This
experiment gives us a way to change how well the participant can remember the words.
(McLeod, S. A. (2008). Peterson and Peterson, 1959. Retrieved from
www.simplypsychology.org/peterson-peterson.html)
This sight gave basic background information on the primacy/Recency Effect and
possible variables that could affect the outcome of experiments that involve the
primacy/Recency Effect.(http://www.appsychology.com/IB
%20Psych/IBcontent/Studies/Glanzer%20and%20Cunitz.htm)
This site is just an in depth look at how the Primacy/Receny Effect works and allows for a
better understanding of it.
(https://www.lancsngfl.ac.uk/secondary/math/download/file/How%20the%20Brain
%20Learns%20by%20David%20Sousa.pdf)

Experiment Procedure and Materials: What are the steps you will take? Who/what will be
involved? What things/materials will you need?
We created a list of unrelated words and then picked members of our psychology class
to read over the list for 30 seconds then attempt to recite as many words on the list in
any order they could with as much time as it took them to give up. We used 6 students
and our teacher for the experiment, we didn't worry about variables like age or sleep. All
we needed was a stopwatch, a table to keep our data and willing participants.

Ethical Concerns: What possible ethical issues will your experiment deal with? How will
you eliminate those concerns?
We didn't find any ethical concerns since we were just having participants read a list of
words and having them recite those words back.

Research Form

Experiment Variables: What ambiguous terms will be defined? How will you control
variables to attempt to reach a valid result?
In the Primacy/Recency Effect of our experiment, primacy is related to the first 4 words
on the list and Recency is related to the last 3 words of the list. We only allowed
participants 30 seconds to look over the words so they wouldn't be able to repeat the list
enough to just list them all out. Our participants also didn't interact with other people
until they were completely done with the experiment.