Conquering Mnemonophobia, with Help from Three Practical Measures of Memory and Application

Recent articles in Teaching of Psychology have endorsed the classroom use of various mnemonic techniques. Yet a degree of mnemonophobia ( i.e., fear of using mnemonics) may persist in the minds of some ToP readers due to various lingering misconceptions. In this regard, we conducted 3 practical experiments with college students using the mnemonic keyword method to learn a set of psychological terms (namely, phobias, for which we provide a sample set, along with their mnemonic representations). We examined students' immediate and delayed recall, inference-demanding matching and categorization tests, and backward recall (recall of terms from definitions). On all measures, mnemonic students statistically outperformed control students. These findings provide further support for the use of classroom-based mnemonic techniques.