College students reported 8 categories of memory aids that they would employ in learning a serial task. Although no significant differences were found between males and females by category of memory aids reported, there was a significant difference among categories. First letters and simple repetition accounted for 48% of all memory aids, while the remaining 52% were divided almost evenly among imagery, descriptive story, mediation, other, phonetic clustering, and semantic clustering. Clearly, the first-letter technique was the most popular mnemonic associated with the serial task.
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