Surviving in the digital environment: Does survival processing provide an additional memory benefit to password generation strategies?

Abstract

People encouraged to think about their survival when encoding information experience a memory advantage even when compared to other tried-and-true methods. Despite the evidence in support of the survival-processing advantage, how this advantage might apply to current-day issues has received little attention. This study aimed to determine if password generation strategies modified to encourage fitness-related encoding would yield an additional benefit in password recall. Participants recruited from online and college samples generated passwords using a sentence-based mnemonic (pilot experiment and Experiment 1) or person-action-object strategy (Experiments 2 and 3), in survival or control scenarios. Results support the plausibility of implementing different strategies for password generation, particularly the person-action-object strategy, and the importance of providing users instructions with which to create their passwords. Although the results illustrated the value of using scenarios for password creation, they did not show evidence of an additional fitness-related benefit, for possible reasons that we discuss.