Recall of Survival-Relevant Passwords
Primary Investigator:
Robert Proctor
Isis Chong, Robert W. Proctor, Ninghui Li, and Jeremiah Blocki
Abstract
Sentence-based mnemonic strategies for which users create passwords based on the first letter of every word in a sentence have been shown to be effective for recalling passwords (Yan et al., 2000). Research in the field of human memory has suggested that information encoded based on its survival-related properties may be more memorable than other information (Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007) and as such, may be applicable to password generation. The present study sought to compare the memorability of a self-relevant mnemonic control strategy against a novel survival-related generation strategy. Findings suggest that the survival processing advantage may not easily generalize to password recall.