When was the last time you read or wrote something in cursive? If you’re like me, you might find that cursive can sometimes be challenging to read, especially if you haven’t seen any examples in a long time (I’m a bit embarrassed that I recently had to stop and think for a moment before I could recall what the cursive letter “I” looks like). Much of this is due to the fact that, these days, a lot of our reading and writing happens on computer screens. Though cursive instruction is making a comeback in some schools, I’m always impressed by how many of my students still use it!

If we think back to how we learned to write in cursive (or to write letters at all), many of us learned by being given lots of sheets to practice, writing the same letters over and over until they “sink in.” But have you ever thought about what sort of effect this has on your visual abilities? Do you actually get better at visually telling the shapes apart, just by going through the movement of drawing out the letters?

Some evidence suggests that you can learn to tell apart letters by repeatedly drawing them, but the reason for this learning is not well understood. One set of explanations is based on the motor aspect itself – that it’s the act of physically carrying out the movements that leads to improvements in visually identifying them. Another explanation is that it has more to do with how you visually attend to the features of the letters themselves while performing the movements. This may be particularly important in writing, where paying attention to certain features is crucial (consider the small line segment that lets you tell apart an “n” from a “u”).

This is the question that Shlomit Ben-Ami*, Batel Buaron, Ori Yaron, Kyle Keane, Virginia Sun*, Flip Phillips, Jason Friedman*, Pawan Sinha & Roy Mukamel*  (*pictured below) investigated in a recent paper in the Psychonomic Society journal Memory & Cognition.

To test this, the authors needed to use shapes that were previously unfamiliar to participants. For example, one wouldn’t use cursive letters for an experiment like this, as they have distinctive features that can be used to tell the letters apart. To minimize participants’ prior exposure to the pictures they drew, the authors developed a set of amoeba-like shapes, that looked like the ones below. The logic was to test participants’ visual abilities in telling these shapes apart, train them in a drawing task, and then test them on their visual abilities once again, after training.

To compare participants’ ability to tell apart the shapes before and after training, the authors gave participants a task in which they were first shown one of the shapes at random, and then had to select the shape they had previously seen from a lineup of the full set of eight shapes.

To train participants through practice with the movements, the authors had participants complete a drawing task on a digital tablet, where they traced the outlines of the shapes (the “Graphomotor condition”), similar to those cursive tracing sheets you might have had in school. Importantly, the authors needed to test whether it’s the motor system itself that supports visual learning, or whether it’s something about how participants pay attention to the patterns.

To determine this, they compared participants’ performance to those who completed one of three passive conditions: “visual dynamic” (watching videos of tracing), “visual static” (watching the final completed trace), and “visual template” (simply viewing the shape). The idea is that if the motor system itself produces visual learning, participants should learn better in the active tracing condition compared to the other three groups.

The results were surprising – when comparing participants’ performance before and after training, participants in every one of the groups improved in telling the shapes apart, but they all improved by the same amount! According to author Roy Mukamel, “contrary to our initial conjecture, active tracing of visual stimuli did not facilitate discrimination of visual stimuli beyond passive visual training.” This would suggest that participants’ attention to the visual patterns of the shapes (i.e., where the bumps and dimples are located) rather than the movements themselves led to these improvements.

To investigate this further, the authors carried out a follow-up experiment. This time, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups – tracing with either their non-dominant or their dominant hand. The idea is that if the motor system supports this visual learning, then participants’ visual abilities should improve more when they’re carrying out more skilled movements (i.e., with their dominant hand) than with less skilled movements (i.e., with their non-dominant hand).

The authors found that, when it came to accuracy in drawing the shapes themselves, participants were more accurate, and improved faster, with their dominant hand compared to their non-dominant hand (something many of us can relate to if we’ve ever tried writing our name with our non-dominant hand!). Importantly, however, participants’ performance in the visual identification task improved in both conditions, and by the same amount. This would suggest that these different forms of training all provide the same benefit. According to author Shlomit Ben-Ami, “these findings suggest that motor activity is not the direct driver of visual learning but may help by supporting detailed visual analysis of the patterns being learned.”

This is potentially reassuring news for those of us who are perhaps a bit out of practice with manual writing and drawing, and instead spend much of our time on computer screens. While someone might be out of practice with the motor aspect (i.e., actually drawing symbols or letters), there may still be ways that they can learn and retain some of their visual understanding of the information by visually analyzing the patterns.

Psychonomic Society article featured in this post

Ben-Ami, S., Buaron, B., Yaron, O., Keane, K., Sun, V. H., Phillips, F., Friedman, J., Sinha, P., & Mukamel, R. (2024). What the visual system can learn from the non-dominant hand: The effect of graphomotor engagement on visual discrimination. Memory & Cognition, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01628-2