The List Length Effect and Immediate Free Recall of Visually Displayed Information in Various Forms

Abstract

This paper investigated four main phenomena connected with the free immediate recall and visual representation of the information: list-length effect, serial position effect, horizontal versus vertical presentation of the information, expression of the information in the form of the symbol, text, and symbol with text. The number of examined respondents was 4140. The experiment revealed a different memory recall of various forms of visually displayed information and studied a dependency of list length effect on primacy and recency effect. The results showed that people recall better the combination of symbols and text than only text or symbols. The other finding indicated a significant difference between the number of recalled items in the tests of 5, 7, and 9 items. The respondents recalled the highest number of items in 5-item tests and the lowest number in 9-item tests. There was investigated that the proportions of the respondents recalling the items from the beginning is higher than those of the respondents recalling the items from the end. The results showed that the primacy effect was higher than the recency effect regardless of the list length (5, 7, or 9 items tests). This article's findings should help design visually optimized websites and applications.