 Hey, Kasey Adalgo here, a writer for psych2go.net and today I'm going to be talking about that theory that order is key. Do you remember an elementary school when you would have to take those vocab quizzes? They would only be about ten words long, but you still had so much trouble memorizing them and studying for them because you realized as you were quizzing yourself after reading the list over and over that you could only remember the first and last words. Well, this phenomenon is known as the serial position effect. As stated above, this effect occurs when you are trying to memorize something, just simple rote memorization. And you find that really you can only remember the first and last object. This was first documented in 1962 by a researcher named Murdoch. They broke the effect up into two different parts and illustrated it with a u-shaped curve. Basically, the u-shaped curve means that you begin something at a top, a high point and lose track of it in the middle only to end again at a high point. That would be the primary effect and the recency effect, the two points of the u. Now, the reason we fall into this u-shaped curve and this weird serial effect of rote memorization is because we tend to start off a task with intense focus, otherwise known as the primary effect. So we intensely focus on the first word because we start, it's the beginning of what our task is. And so that's why we remember it so much. The u, where everything falls in the middle, is where everything falls and the task begins to lose focus. We then again have to end off on a high note and that's how we remember the last word because we try to end everything on a high note and also because it's so much closer to like how we end that we'll be more able to remember it. But that only works when you know the length of a list. What if you didn't give participants this the length of the list? How if it was like super long? Would they still be able to remember the first word as well as the last word? For now it has to remain as food for thought.