Post-training Assessment

In the second session (same session for healthy participants), participants were instructed to use MoL as shown, including writing down their loci next to recalled items. That instruction would later be used to verify the correct implementation of the MoL, by comparing the memory palace's loci used during MoL training and MoL practice to those in the post-training task, however, due to an error in the written instructions, only the loci of remembered items were registered by the majority of healthy individuals.

In all the six versions of the memory task (three lists of words, three lists of images), both the words and the images lists contained different items. Verbal and figural stimuli were included to assess whether MoL efficacy was dependent on the nature of stimuli, as words and images may require different cognitive processes during MoL encoding, due to the visuospatial nature of the task. Images with high name agreement scores were selected from the BOSS database (Brodeur et al., 2010) and their corresponding names were used for the lists of words so that 50 concepts in word version and image version were used in total. Half of the participants saw 25 concepts in words and the other 25 concepts in pictures. The other half of the participants were exposed to the concepts in reverse order. The two groups of 25 concepts were balanced for word agreement according to the BOSS norms (Brodeur et al., 2010). The same procedure was followed with the presentation of the 20-items lists to individuals with schizophrenia.