Drawing Aids Memory More Than Just Writing

Memory is an essential aspect of everyday life, whether it be remembering directions, someone’s name or material for an exam. As college students, we are expected to understand and apply concepts we have learned in class, but with juggling multiple classes and other commitments, sometimes using rote memorization is the best option to cram for tomorrow’s quiz or exam. Many people use mnemonics or simply repetition to retain information, but research shows that engaging in drawings leads to better retrieval of memory.

A New York Times article called “A Simple Way to Better Remember Things: Draw a Picture” written by Tim Herrera, analyses research done by Jeffrey Wammes, Melissa Meade and Myra Fernandes. Wammes and his colleagues preformed the study by asking participants to either write or draw a certain word and found that those people who were asked to draw had an increase in recall compared to writing. As for those with no artistic bone in their body, stick figures or an attempt to draw was still proven to be a more effective method of recall than just rewriting notes or passively looking at images.

With age, necessary regions of the brain involved in memory such as the frontal lobes and the hippocampus decline, but areas of the brain involved in visuospatial processing, representing images and pictures remain intact. Wammes et al. study showed that from the pool of participants, either young adults or elderly, drawing proved beneficial in retaining information for both regardless of age; electing that drawing makes use of the regions of the brain that remain intact as people age. They wrote that drawing was “a seamless integration of semantic, visual and motor aspects of a memory trace,” which aligns with Dr. Melissa Hebscher’s recent talk at Loyola University Chicago about episodic autobiographical memory (EAM) that integrates various parts of the brain to enable individuals to recall spatial and sensory information from a past event based on egocentric or allocentric views.

Dr. Hebscher’s research focused on the correlation of EAM recall and brain regions involved in spatial information and found that there were individual differences in memory retrieval. Nonetheless, spatial information was a strong factor in EAM recall ability. Her findings also showed a positive relationship between increased precuneus volume and EAM recall from an egocentric viewpoint. These findings may be further studied in a wider age range by incorporating drawing into EAM recall, since the performance of drawing may use more of an egocentric perspective.

References:

Hebscher, Melissa, et al. “The Precuneus and Hippocampus Contribute to Individual Differences in the Unfolding of Spatial Representations during Episodic Autobiographical Memory.” Neuropsychologia, vol. 110, 2018, pp. 123–133.

Herrera, Tim. "A Simple Way to Better Remember Things: Draw a Picture." The New York Times, January 6, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/smarter-living/memory-tricks-mnemonics.html

University of Waterloo. "Drawing is better than writing for memory retention." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 December 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181206114724.htm>.