Abstract
Serial position effects have been confirmed through several researches with regard to verbal memory in the field of psychology. In this study, we examined if the serial position effects are also confirmed in the motor memory. The purpose of this study was to get some implications about the kinesthetic input process and its memory systems.
This study consisted of three experiments of healthy adults. In experiment 1, we asked subjects to close their eyes, flex their elbow at a right angle, and hold 5 different weights, between 0.5 and 4 kg, in random order. Then, we asked subjects to reproduce each force that they needed to hold the 5 different weights in order or in reverse. In experiment 2, we measured errors in each subject to detect scale of each given weight. In experiment 3, we reexamined the serial position effects using 7 different weights, 0.5 kg〜7 kg.
As a result, we could not find any serial position effects in the memory of kinesthetic sense according to our three experiments in this study. Rather, we got an implication of that a schema in each subject was referred to detect the scale of the given weight at the point of input of kinesthetic sense.
It was suggested that the top-down process using the schema in individual was working at the stage of kinesthetic stimulus identification, and the schema also has an important role at the stage of reproduction in each subject.
