They split a population of undergraduate students into 2 groups, one that took notes and one that relied on straight memory. They showed them pairs of cards and instructed them to memorize the location. One group wrote it down and the other did not. After the study time, the note-taking group had their notes taken away and the full group was tested on the cards’ location. Surprisingly, the note-taking group performed very poorly in the exercise, far underperforming the memory group