You are asked to learn the 50 U.S. states, so you divide the country into geographic areas and set about your task. You are more likely to succeed than someone who begins to learn the states at random, because your system
A. capitalizes on the serial-position effect by fragmenting the task.
B. employs cues to organize your transfer from sensory memory.
C. helps you encode the names of states at the time of recall.
D. minimizes proactive interference through the ‘blocking’ effect.
Answer:A
You are asked to learn the 50 U.S. states, so you divide the country into geographic areas and set about your task. You are more likely to succeed than someone who begins to learn the states at random, because your system
A. capitalizes on the serial-position effect by fragmenting the task. B. employs cues to organize your transfer from sensory memory. C. helps you encode the names of states at the time of recall. D. minimizes proactive interference through the ‘blocking’ effect.
Explanation: A) The serial-position effect is that recall of items at the beginning and the end of a list is higher than of items in the middle of a list. Part learning, as occurs in this geography example, reduces the number of items in the middle. Consequently, verbal recall should increase.