Serial-position effects in paragraph recall following mild closed-head injury.

Serial-position effects were examined on a contextual memory task (paragraph recall) for patients with minor to mild closed-head injury and normal controls. Analysis indicated that at immediate recall, both normals and closed-head-injury patients have primacy and recency effects. With regard to total recall, however, the closed-head-injury patients remembered significantly fewer items than normal controls. The poorer performance of the minor to mild closed-head-injury group was not related to the duration from injury to neuropsychological evaluation and appears to be a lasting feature of memory performance following such injury. The pattern of serial-position effects was different between the groups. Normal controls showed slight recency and primacy effects and relatively better recall for the middle portions of the story, while patients with minor to mild closed-head injuries have prominent recency and primacy effects. Potential explanations for this pattern of performance are discussed.