An educational psychologist investigated the effectiveness of different memory strategies for remembering a list of items.

In Condition A, 15 participants were instructed to memorize a shopping list of 12 items using rote rehearsal (repeating the words silently to themselves). In Condition B, 15 different participants were instructed to memorize the same shopping list of 12 items using the Method of Loci (associating each item with a specific location in a familiar room).

The results are given in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Number of participants who correctly recalled all 12 items in the correct order

After the results had been collected, the researcher asked all 30 participants to describe how they attempted to memorize the list.