In a study published in 2007, Jerome Yesavage and Terrence Rose added another step in using the method of loci which proved to help recall.
They instructed their test group "to make a personal judgment of the pleasantness of each visual image association.
As predicted, subjects in the Loci Plus Judgment group showed greater improvement in their recall following instruction in the mnemonic.
These were their findings: "In all repetition conditions, mnemonic subjects significantly and substantially outperformed students who were given free study.
The efficiency and success of encoding (and subsequent retrieval) is largely dependent upon the type of associations you choose to make.
[11] Jennifer Coane (2013) sought to determine whether difference in age can influence the effectiveness of elaborative encoding.
To test the effectiveness of elaboration as a form of encoding, Bradshaw and Anderson (1982) asked two groups of participants to memorize obscure bits of information about a famous person.
[7] In the first group, the participants memorized one single fact, such as "Mozart made a long journey from Munich to Paris."
After a week, the participants underwent a cued recall test and were asked to provide the target sentence after hearing the word "Mozart".
After each correct recall in the drop group the pair of words were removed from future study and retrieval tasks.
Experiment 3 had similar procedure with Swahili-English word pairs but had a fourth group: repeated elaborations.
Results showed that repeated retrieval enhanced long term memory and mnemonics do not stem from elaborations, unless it was for the first recall.
Eugene Winograd (1981) of Emory University conducted a study to find a correlation between elaborative encoding and the memory of faces.
[15] Winograd's theory was that it was easier to remember a person's face based on perceived judgment of honesty, friendliness, or intelligence rather than physical traits like a big nose or bushy eyebrows.
One set of questions pertained to physical traits, such as big ears, thin lips, and bushy eyebrows.
The research has shown that the way facial recognition and memory work is by increasing the probability of encoding a distinctive trait.
In a practical sense, actively relating new information back to previous knowledge expands and intensifies the web of memories and mental connections.