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
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.”
We discovered a significant recall advantage for words that were drawn as compared to those that were written
Jeffrey Wammes, PhD Candidate, U of Waterloo
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.
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