If you haven’t read the book, Remembering Willie Nelson, yet, I think that people here will like it. Check out the link and leave a comment here if you’ve read it.
The book contains many lists of references which can be used for further investigation. Here are two of the studies I found through the book:
Novices, Apprentices, and Mnemonists: Acquiring Expertise with the Phonetic Mnemonic
Abstract Three kinds of participants can be identified in research with the phonetic mnemonic—novices, apprentices, and mnemonists, and most research has involved novices. Two experiments investigated whether ordinary college students using the phonetic mnemonic could duplicate two feats of Luria's memorist identified as S: memorizing a 20-digit matrix in 40 seconds, and memorizing a 50-digit matrix in 3 minutes. Experiment 1 was a large-n study in which novices were provided with phonetic keywords along with the matrices; nearly half of the students successfully memorized each matrix with no errors in recall. Experiment 2 was a small-n study in which apprentices were not given the keywords with the matrices; three of the four students also successfully memorized each matrix with perfect recall. The results suggest that ordinary college students are capable of acquiring a level of skilled memory that rivals the abilities that appear to be innate or idiosyncratic in memorists and mnemonists, and that additional research with mnemonic apprentices might be beneficial.
Promoting higher-order learning benefits by building lower-order mnemonic connections
Abstract Two experiments were conducted in an effort to combine a mnemonic strategy for remembering individual items with a mnemonic procedure for remembering, and reasoning about, inter-item relationships. In Experiment 1, students using the combined mnemonic approach were able to identify more individual items (fish names from their pictures) and were subsequently able to remember more components of six studied hierarchies (order, family, and species names of the fish) than did students in an ‘own best method’ control condition. Additionally, and importantly, mnemonic students outperformed control students on an analogy task requiring inferences about superordinate, subordinate, and coordinate relationships. In Experiment 2, the initial number of to-be-learned fish was reduced so that the performance of both mnemonic and control students was comparable with respect to fish identification. Despite such item-level comparability, an advantage for mnemonically instructed students was observed on both immediate and two-day-delayed hierarchy tests. We suggest that by cementing lower-order connections, mnemonic strategies facilitate students' learning of higher-order information.