Megan Kelly

Who they are

The work of Megan Kelly reaches this site through the papers listed below. On this site the name is tied to Cognitive Offloading, The Primacy Effect, Serial Position Effect.

Key papers

Kelly, M. O., & Risko, E. F. (2019). Offloading memory: Serial position effects. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1347-1353. What it reports: Two experiments in which participants wrote down word lists. Having notes available impaired memory for early items and eliminated the primacy effect, while recency persisted.

Kelly, M. O., & Risko, E. F. (2022). Revisiting the influence of offloading memory on free recall. Memory & Cognition, 50, 710-721. What it reports: A replication of the offloading finding in which primacy appeared in both conditions, so any reduction from offloading looked smaller than first reported.

Key ideas

Cognitive Offloading: Using the world, or a device, to hold information so the brain does not have to.

The Primacy Effect: What comes first counts for more. In impression formation, the first traits we hear about someone set a direction, and later traits get read in that light rather than weighed on their own.

Serial Position Effect: The tendency to remember items from the start and end of a list better than items from the middle.

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