Suppose that a professor asks the students in her class to say their names out loud (one at a time) on the first day of class. Then she asks them to write down as many of their classmates' names as they can recall. Then she constructs a graph that shows "Number of correct responses" on the Y-axis and "Serial position of the name" on the X-axis. The shape of the graph

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This phenomenon is explained by the serial position effect, where individuals tend to remember the first (primacy effect) and last (recency effect) items in a series better than the middle items, resulting in a U-shaped curve on a graph plotting recall accuracy against item position.

Suppose That a Professor Asks the Students in Her Class