Moishe can remember only the first two items and the last two items on the grocery list that his wife just read to him over the phone. The other five items in between are gone. This is an example of the ________.
A) encoding specificity effect
B) serial position effect
C) TOT effect
D) reintegrative effect

Question

Moishe can remember only the first two items and the last two items on the grocery list that his wife just read to him over the phone. The other five items in between are gone. This is an example of the ________.
A) encoding specificity effect
B) serial position effect 
C) TOT effect 
D) reintegrative effect

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The serial position effect states that people tend to remember the first and last items in a list better than the items in the middle. In this case, Moishe can only remember the first two and last two items, which is consistent with the serial position effect. The other options are not applicable to this scenario - the encoding specificity effect refers to the idea that cues present during encoding help with retrieval, the TOT effect refers to the feeling of knowing something without being able to retrieve it, and the reintegrative effect refers to how chunks of information are reassembled after initially being broken down into smaller components.

Moishe Can Remember Only the First Two Items and the Last