Does the Order of Visiting Destinations Affect Their Recall and Evaluation?

Tourists frequently engage in visiting a sequence of cities, sites, and destinations. Previous psychology studies have shown the impact of order on recall and favorability; key concepts are the serial position effect and primacy and recency influences. A field-based natural experiment collected posttrip responses from 179 international tourists to four major Iranian cities. The researchers examined the relationships between the order of visiting the cities, tourists’ recall and judgment. Results from the manipulations revealed there is a relationship (mainly Primacy) between position in the itinerary and their recall. For evaluative judgments, both primacy and recency effects were linked to order of visiting. The work has implications for the presentations of tourism units in a sequence and sharpens the way we use the expression memorable in tourism research.

The Influence of Commodity Presentation Mode on Online Shopping Decision Preference Induced by the Serial Position Effect

The information cluster that supports the final decision in a decision task is usually presented as a series of information. According to the serial position effect, the decision result is easily affected by the presentation order of the information. In this study, we seek to investigate how the presentation mode of commodities and the informativeness on a shopping website will influence online shopping decisions. To this end, we constructed two experiments via a virtual online shopping environment. The first experiment suggests that the serial position effect can induce human computer interaction decision-making bias, and user decision-making results in separate evaluation mode are more prone to the recency effect, whereas user decision-making results in joint evaluation mode are more prone to the primacy effect. The second experiment confirms the influence of explicit and implicit details of information on the decision bias of the human computer interaction caused by the serial position effect. The results of the research will be better applied to the design and development of shopping websites or further applied to the interactive design of complex information systems to alleviate user decision-making biases and induce users to make more rational decisions.

Ensuring Sustainable Evaluation: How to Improve Quality of Evaluating Grant Proposals?

The principle of sustainable development is an obligation placed on all entities involved in the implementation and delivery of the structural funds made available not only by the European Commission but also by grant donors from all over the world. For this reason, when applying for a grant, proposals need to demonstrate the positive or neutral impact of the project on sustainable development. To be able to select projects that will ensure sustainability, we need to ensure the effective evaluation of the proposals. The process of their evaluation should be objective, unbiased and transparent. However, current processes have several limitations. The process by which grants are awarded and proposals evaluated has come under increasing scrutiny, with a particular focus on the selection of reviewers, fallibility of their assessments, the randomness of assessments and the low level of common agreement. In our studies, we demonstrated how some of those limitations may be overcome. Our topic of interest is the work of reviewers/experts who evaluate scientific grant proposals. We analyse data coming from two prominent scientific national grant foundations, which differ in terms of expert’s selection procedure. We discuss the problems associated with both procedures (rating style of the reviewers, lack of calibration and serial position effect) and present potential solutions to prevent them. We conclude that, to increase the unbiasedness and fairness of the evaluation process, reviewers’ work should be analysed. We also suggest that, within a certain panel, all grant proposals should be evaluated by the same set of reviewers, which would help to eliminate the distorting influence of the selection of a very severe or very lenient expert. Such effective assessment and moderation of the process would help ensure the quality and sustainability of evaluations.

Distinct role of flexible and stable encoding in sequential working memory

The serial-position effect in working memory is considered important for studying how a sequence of sensory information can be retained and manipulated simultaneously in neural memory circuits. Here, via a precise analysis of the primacy and recency effects in human psychophysical experiments, we propose that stable and flexible coding take distinct roles of retaining and updating information in working memory, and that their combination induces serial-position effects spontaneously. We found that stable encoding retains memory to induce the primacy effect, while flexible encoding used for learning new inputs induces the recency effect. A model simulation based on human data, confirmed that a neural network with both flexible and stable synapses could reproduce the major characteristics of serial-position effects. Our new prediction, that the control of resource allocation by flexible-stable coding balance can modulate memory performance in sequence-specific manner, was supported by pre-cued memory performance data in humans.

A Study on the Serial Position Effect of Memory according to Illumination of LED Light

The purpose of this study was to verify the forms of the effect of serial position effects of memory according to the illuminance of light. This study was conducted as an experimental method, and 21 adults without cognitive impairment participated in the study. The illuminance condition was designed with high illuminance condition of 1,000 lx and low illuminance condition of 300 lx. The memory task used word list of 20 items consisting of a series of pointless spellings. After memorizing the word list for 10 minutes, the participant performed a retention task 24 hours later. The memory retention task consisted of filling the empty part of the learned word and completing the word. The analysis was performed by dividing the word items into three conditions: primacy, middle, and recency. Primacy used the first item in the word list, Middle used the 10th item in the middle of the word list, and finally Recency used the last item in the word list for analysis. The result was F = 4.16 (p = .02), and showed that there was a statistically significant difference in memory retention of primacy, middle, and recency at 95% confidence level in dim condition.

Maradona in our minds: Memory for the FIFA World Cup reveals common effects between individual and collective memories.

The FIFA World Cup football (soccer) tournament is one of the most widely watched sporting events in the world. Particularly, the Argentina national football team has appeared in five World Cup finals, winning two of them, and the general support for this team represents a long-standing tradition in this country. In the present study, we asked whether the history of the FIFA World Cup constructs a significant collective memory. Considering that this is an idiosyncratic and informal knowledge, largely affected by emotions, we hypothesized that it constitutes a solid ground for addressing collective memory properties. An online memory task was conducted asking to a large group of Argentine adults (N=407) which country was the winner, the runner-up, and the host of each FIFA World Cup tournament that took place since 1930 to 2014. In addition, participants were asked to rank the emotional content and the response confidence of each tournament. Finally, participants reported a number of keywords associated with each World Cup edition, to measure the memory detail. Overall, our results reveal the existence of a robust collective memory for the World Cup, showing a high memory accuracy and detail along the history of the championships. We demonstrated the presence of parallel effects between individual and collective memories, such as a serial-position effect, a modulation by emotion and a reminiscence bump. In addition, we modelled the forgetting curves for different World Cups, revealing that the most memorable ones where could take almost a century to fade from collective memory.