Final answer:
Alyssa is using the power of chunking to remember her Social Security number by grouping the digits into meaningful and manageable sets, which is a common and effective memory enhancement strategy.
Step-by-step explanation:
Alyssa's strategy in remembering her Social Security number illustrates the power of chunking. This memory strategy involves organizing information into manageable groups, which helps in improving the recall by taking advantage of our short-term memory's capability to hold a limited amount of information at one time. By grouping her nine-digit Social Security number into meaningful chunks, Alyssa enhances her ability to remember the sequence, as opposed to trying to recall a long string of numbers. This technique is particularly useful when dealing with numerical sequences such as phone numbers, dates, and, in Alyssa's case, her Social Security number.
Chunking leverages the working memory's limited capacity, which is generally around 7 plus or minus 2 items, although contemporary research suggests it may be closer to 4 plus or minus 1. This method does not involve continuous repetition like maintenance rehearsal, nor does it rely on the primacy or recency effects, which highlight the tendency to remember items at the beginning or end of a list better. Instead, chunking reorganizes the input into meaningful and more easily recalled units.