The Effect of Mnemonic Strategies and Retention Intervals on Recall by Order.
The question of how to improve memory has been asked for a long time. It has been shown that mnemonic strategies can increase the likelihood of recall for that item. For example, Roediger (1980) examined four different mnemonic devices in aiding recall. There were five conditions in the experiment. One group used the mental image method, which pictured the object the word referred to floating in the air. Another group used the link method in which they linked the words in the list together and have them interact. A third group used the peg method in which they associated the word with the numbers 1-20. A fourth group used the loci in which they linked the words with a familiar location in a sensible way. The control group was told to repeat the word and to think of the meaning of the word as they repeated it. Each group was tested on three different nights. The first night they were tested on a list of words and the words position in the list before they received their instructions. The second night they were asked to recall three lists of words and the position using the particular method they were given. The third night they were asked to recall the words and there positions from the previous night. They found that recall was greater for the subjects that employed mnemonic strategies than the group that did not use a mnemonic technique. .
Corbett (1977) examined recall memory for paired associates by repetition or imagery mnemonics. There were three groups of three participants in this experiment. Participants were tested twice a day for six days. In one session they were asked to learn a list of eighteen paired nouns by using repetition. In the next session they were asked to recall the eighteen-paired nouns by creating a visual image for each pair that used the objects named in each pair. Each session lasted for forty-five minutes.