University of Waterloo
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that
drawing pictures of information that needs to be remembered is a strong and
reliable strategy to enhance memory.
"We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding
strategies, but drawing always came out on top," said the study's lead
author, Jeffrey Wammes, PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology.
"We
believe that the benefit arises because drawing helps to create a more cohesive
memory trace that better integrates visual, motor and semantic
information."
The study, by Wammes, along with fellow PhD candidate Melissa Meade and Professor Myra Fernandes, presented student participants with a list of simple, easily drawn words, such as "apple."
The students were
given 40 seconds to either draw the word, or write it out repeatedly. They were
then given a filler task of classifying musical tones to facilitate the
retention process.
Finally, the researchers asked students to freely recall as
many words as possible from the initial list in just 60 seconds.
The study appeared in the the Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology.
"We discovered a significant recall advantage for words
that were drawn as compared to those that were written," said Wammes.
"Participants often recalled more than twice as many drawn than written
words. We labelled this benefit 'the drawing effect,' which refers to this
distinct advantage of drawing words relative to writing them out."
In variations of the experiment in which students drew the words
repeatedly, or added visual details to the written letters, such as shading or
other doodles, the results remained unchanged. Memory for drawn words was
superior to all other alternatives.
Drawing led to better later memory
performance than listing physical characteristics, creating mental images, and
viewing pictures of the objects depicted by the words.
"Importantly, the quality of the drawings people made did
not seem to matter, suggesting that everyone could benefit from this memory
strategy, regardless of their artistic talent. In line with this, we showed
that people still gained a huge advantage in later memory, even when they had
just 4 seconds to draw their picture," said Wammes.
While the drawing effect proved reliable in testing, the
experiments were conducted with single words only. Wammes and his team are
currently trying to determine why this memory benefit is so potent, and how
widely it can be applied to other types of information.