Editing Serial-position effect (section)

==Related effects==
In 1977, [[William Crano]] decided to outline a study to further the previous conclusions on the nature of order effects, in particular those of primacy vs. recency, which were said to be unambiguous and opposed in their predictions. The specifics tested by Crano were:

;Change of meaning hypothesis: The items on the beginning of a list establish a theme that the participants expect the rest of the list to fall into. The participant modified the meaning of some of the words on the list to fit with the expectation he or she established. Watkins and Peynicioglu (1984) explain this as participants changing the meaning of words, deviating from the established theme, to reduce the amount of deviation in the information presented. 
;Inconsistency discounting: Participants would disregard information that was not consistent with previous items presented to them.  In other words, discounting involves thinking of inconsistent information as having less value than information that is consistent with other information presented (Devine & Ostrom, 1985).
;Attention decrement hypothesis: Information presented first has a greater influence on participants than information that is presented later, causing a primacy effect to occur, even if the information is consistent. Steiner and Rain (1989) explain people pay more attention to information presented at the beginning, but progressively pay less attention to the information presented to them. The primacy effect occurs because participants pay attention to the beginning information and ignore the information presented later. On the other hand, if participants are in a situation where they have to continuously pay attention to information, a recency effect may occur.

The '''continuity effect''' or lag-recency effect predicts that having made a successful recall, the next recalled item is less likely to come from a remote serial position, rather than a nearby serial position (Kahana, Howard, Zaromb & Wingfiend, 2002). The difference between the two items' serial position is referred to as serial-position lag. Another factor, called the conditional-response probability, is the likelihood of recalling a certain serial-position lag. A graph of serial-position lag versus conditional response probability reveals that the next item recalled minimizes absolute lag, with a higher likelihood for the adjacent than the previous one.