Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The method of loci is a powerful mnemonic technique for memorizing a list of unrelated items. With a pre-specified routein a familiar ”memory palace”, one can encode material by attaching items to loci along this route, and later effectivelyrecall them by mentally walking along the same route. Despite its efficacy, there is no existing model that explains whythe method of loci promotes memory improvement during memory search. To fill this gap, we provide a rational accountof why the method of loci improves memory. We define memory search as a task with the goal of minimizing retrievalcost, and demonstrate that the method of loci gives an optimal policy for this task. We discuss the implications of thisresult, and compare it with models of memory search without using mnemonic techniques.