Enhancing Memory with Redundant Labels

Abstract

DESPITE nearly a century of active research into memory, the academic psychologist is singularly ill equipped to offer good advice when asked how to enhance memory. He can only point to the apparent efficacy of techniques developed by informal study since the ancient Greeks first expounded the “art of memory”¹. These techniques were rejected as irrelevant gimmickry by the early students of memory, who restricted their attentions to the mindless mechanical recitation of nonsense syllables. Only recently have they been thought worthy of the attention of respectable psychologists². In this revival spirit we describe here our preliminary studies of a “labelling” procedure which seems to enhance memory.