COMBINING MNEMONIC STRATEGIES TO REMEMBER WHO PAINTED WHAT WHEN

Prior research has documented the efficacy of an adaptation of the face-name mnemonic procedure for remembering who painted what painting-the kind of task encountered in an art appreciation class. Yet students are frequently called upon to do more than just remember names. For example, they may be required to remember when a painting was completed. Three experiments were conducted in an effort first to validate the phonetic (or digit-consonant) mnemonic system as a useful strategy and then to apply it to our artwork-learning task. Ultimately (Experiment 3), we combined the previous painting-artist mnemonic procedure (for learning names) with the phonetic mnemonic strategy (for learning dates) to facilitate memory for ''who painted what when.'' Our results supported the use of the phonetic mnemonic system, as well as the combined mnemonic approach taken in Experiment 3. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.