One man's memory: A study of a mnemonist

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Abstract
This paper reports a systematic study of a man (T.E.) with astonishing mnemonic skills. After a brief description of his most favoured mnemonic technique, the ‘figure alphabet’, his performance and the mnemonic techniques used on five classical memory tasks are described. These are: one task involving both short‐ and long‐term memory (the Atkinson‐Shiffrin ‘keeping track’ task), two tasks involving just long‐term memory (recall of number matrices and the effects of imagery and deep structure complexity upon recall), and two tasks involving just short‐term memory (short‐term retention of individual verbal items and digit span). Whenever possible, T.E.'s performance was compared with that of normal subjects, and also with other mnemonists who have been studied in the past.There was no evidence to suggest that T.E. has any unusual basic memory abilities; rather he employs mnemonic techniques to aid memory, and the evidence suggests that previous mnemonists who have been studied by psychologists have used very similar techniques.

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