When you go grocery shopping, how do you remember what to buy?  Write down a list, of course.  That slip of paper, or your smartphone, will do the remembering for you (it’s an external memory, as we have noted on this blog before). But what if you lose the paper or your phone’s battery dies? Maybe you should have drawn your list. Or even just thought about drawing it!

New research by Jeff Wammes, Brady Roberts, and Myra Fernandes in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review explores how drawing things can boost our later memory for the objects.

Picture this: as a participant in that experiment, you sit down in front of a computer and you see a series of words to study for a later test (e.g., trumpet, rooster, magnet, carrot).  For half of these you make a quick drawing (don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be any good), and for the other half you simply write down the word. A few minutes later, it is time for the memory test.  Importantly, you do not get to review any of the drawing or writing you did, simulating the experience of losing your shopping list (or phone) on your way to the store.

Here is what happens on the test: you see a series of words (e.g., pizza, trumpet, penguin) and for each one you have to decide whether it was in the study list or not. This is what memory researchers call a recognition test.

So what were the results?  On average, people correctly recognized 94% of the words they had drawn, compared to only 71% of the words they had written.  That’s a big enough difference to make or break your plans for cooking dinner!

But why does drawing boost memory? The challenge for psychological scientists is that everyday tasks usually involve multiple processes, so we need to design clever experiments to tease them apart.  In the case of drawing, Wammes and colleagues propose three underlying processes: planning how you will draw the object, moving your hand to make the drawing, and seeing the picture you drew.  Any of these three components of the task could benefit memory.  How to disentangle them?

Here is the key manipulation in their experiment that I have not told you about yet: for half of the words that you study, you indeed get the chance to draw or write the word as instructed; but for the other half of the words, you do not get that chance.  You only get a second or two to plan how you will draw or write the word, and then the computer just moves on to the next word.  This isolates the first of the three components that Wammes and colleagues proposed, namely planning.  For these words, you do not get a chance to actually move your hand to make the drawing, or to see the picture you drew. So any effect on later test performance must be due to the planning part of the task.

What were the results for the words that people only planned to draw versus planned to write?  On average, people correctly recognized 81% of the words they had prepared to draw, compared to 58% of the words they had prepared to write.  The memory benefit of drawing appears even when you do not actually do the drawing!  Also notice that just spending a second or two planning to draw resulted in better memory than actually taking the time to write the words (81% vs. 71%).

In a nutshell, the process of merely planning how you would draw something appears to help you remember that thing. More research will be needed to better understand this result. Prior research has shown that imagining pictures of objects (i.e., mental imagery) enhances memory compared to repeatedly saying the names of objects (i.e., rote rehearsal; Schnorr & Atkinson, 1969).

Is there a difference between imagining a picture and imagining you are about to draw that picture?  Perhaps preparing to draw additionally activates motor processes (even though you have not actually moved yet) which give additional context to the memory for the object.

Other lines of research have shown that performing a simple task (e.g., “turn the handle”) boosts memory compared to just hearing the phrase (Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1989).  Wammes and colleagues point out that this enactment effect even holds when people merely imagine performing the task.

So is the effect of preparing to draw simply a combination of mental imagery and planned enactment?  Perhaps.

Let’s do some introspection, just for fun.  First, imagine a carrot.  Second, imagine how you would draw a carrot.  In the first case, the image of a carrot likely popped fully-formed into your mind.  In the second case, perhaps you envisioned which part of the carrot would come into existence first (the pointy end?), and which direction the first stroke of the pencil would travel.  So, in addition to having a plan for movement, we might say the second mental carrot also had some temporality: it developed in our mind’s eye like an animated GIF.

I wonder too if there are even more mental tricks we could take advantage of.  Prior research has shown that imagining bizarre images can be particularly beneficial to memory (McDaniel & Einstein, 1986).  Perhaps preparing to draw a bizarre trumpet or magnet would boost memory even more.  Bonus for imagining how you would draw them together (i.e., akin to forming an interactive image).  Finally, it would also be interesting to see if artistic skill plays a role at all here.  I can fancifully imagine drawing a rooster like Picasso, even though I lack the skill to actually do so.

At any rate, I am sure that grocery shoppers of the world can appreciate the insight that drawing helps memory, even if you just think about doing it.  Now I am off to go buy carrots and magnets (but not a penguin).

Psychonomics article featured in this post:

Wammes, J. D., Roberts, B. R., & Fernandes, M. A. (2018). Task preparation as a mnemonic: The benefits of drawing (and not drawing). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. DOI:  10.3758/s13423-018-1477-y.