DRAWINGS OF MEMORY PICTURES SERIES
Drawing incorporates (and potentially integrates) three distinct types of experience: semantic (the internal generation process that allows you to translate a word into a series of visual characteristics you can draw), motor (the planned movement of your hand as you draw), and visual (watching your drawing appear on the page). Wammes theorizes that his findings might have something to do with the multi-sensory nature of the activity. Even reducing the time allotted for drawing from 40 seconds to four didn’t change the results. Every time, the half of the group that drew pictures of the words had the best recall-in some cases, they could remember twice as many words as those assigned a different task.
In later versions of this experiment, rather than writing the word over and over again, half of the participants were asked to mentally visualize the object described by that word to look at pre-existing pictures of the object or to write a list of its physical characteristics. After a short “filler task” to clear their minds, they were given a test that asked them to recall as many words as possible from the original list. He and his team observed a phenomenon they termed the “drawing effect”-that illustrating a word’s meaning always leads to the highest levels of memory recall.įor their initial experiment, Wammes and his team presented participants with a list of easy-to-visualize words, like “kite” or “peanut.” Half the group was instructed to write the word repeatedly the other half, to draw a picture of the object it represented. Wammes, now a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Yale University. Take, for example, a 2016 study led Jeffrey D. Research in recent years has found that drawing, more than writing or other retention strategies, is a highly effective means of boosting memory. “I can open up a sketchbook from when I was in school and I can remember it exactly: ‘Oh, it was really hot in the sun, but it was cool in the shade, and I was coming down with a cold….’”Īnd while not everyone may boast Sausen’s impressive level of recall, she’s not alone in experiencing a powerful link between drawing and memory. What was I thinking? What was I trying to memorialize in this photograph?’”īut Sausen, an avid sketcher, says she’s never had such difficulty recalling the circumstances surrounding a particular drawing. A few weeks ago, Minnesota-based architect Amber Sausen was scrolling through her old iPhone photos when she found herself momentarily perplexed: “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t remember taking that at all.
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