As Stephanie walked into the supermarket, she realized she forgot her grocery list. She tried to recall the items on the list, but once she got up to about ten items, she realized she had already forgotten the first few items. What did Stephanie experience?

A) Rehearsal

B) Displacement

C) Retrograde amnesia

D) Decay

E) Reconstruction

Answer: Displacement

Explanation:

What is meant by displacement in your memory?

Displacement is a term that is used to explain the fact that we tend to forget the infromation stored in the short term memory due to the lack of availability.

In a short term memory as long as the new information is acquired the old information is then eliminated quickly or displaced.

Displacement also suggest that the information that has been stored for too long will be easily displaced

Under this theory it is discovered also that when people are give a list of words to recall in any order they are mostly likely to recall those that are at the top of the list, the recalling of items at the top of the list is referred to as primacy and those at the end is know as recency effect.

Primacy effect explains that we are able to recall the first words in the list because when we first receive them there are not competing with other words so it is easy to rehearse them repeatedly for several times and as a result they get transferred to our long term memory.

As the list get longer though there is a competition now between words which makes it hard to remember or to keep rehearsing those at the end of the list as the result they stay in the short term memory until they get displaced which explains the recency effect.