Serial position effect refers to the difficulty of learning certain material as a function of its position in a list. The serial position curve is the U- shaped curve by which the results of the experiment are summarized. The serial position curve shows the parentage of words recalled at each of the 20 or more positions on the list. It was found in a typical memory experiment, that items at the beginning and end of the …showed first 75 words of 710 total…

…showed last 75 words of 710 total…counting backwards eliminated the recency effect, but had no effect at all on the primacy effect. By the same logic, Glanzer & Cunitz (1996) demonstrated the possibility of altering the primacy effect independently from the recency effect by increasing the list length from 20 to 40 words. Long-term memory is known to be worse for long lists than for short list, therefore by increasing the length of the list they lowered recall of the first items on the list.