Maintaining secure radio communications in the armed forces places an especially heavy cognitive load on all involved personnel. For example, in the Army each individual must memorize on a daily basis at least three new five character codes. The current Army code consists of the sequence letter-digit-letter followed by the sequence digit-digit (LDL-DD.) Research on paired associate learning suggests that recall could be improved by using either a letter only stimulus pair (LLL-LL) or a letter-digit stimulus pair (LLL-DD). An experiment was run to test this hypothesis. Recall for the experimental letter-digit code was over twice as good as recall for the current code.
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