By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel
We have looked at the benefits of combining text and visuals for memory and learning – see dual coding – in many previous posts. A new series of experiments has investigated the effects of drawing specifically and whether drawing improves memory for the to-be-learned material compared to other strategies (1). The research is so new that it is currently only available as a preprint and in the process of being submitted for publication. The upside of this is that the paper is already available publicly and that you can provide the authors with feedback on it. The researchers wanted to test whether drawing increases memory performance more than writing or mental imagery. In three experiments they pitched different conditions against each other to explore this topic.
Drawing vs. Writing vs. Doodling: Single Words Recall
In the first experiment, participants studied a list of words. Each word was presented individually to the participant followed by one of three prompts: drawing out the word, writing out the word repeatedly, doodling something unrelated. In the final memory test, the words that were drawn were remembered better than the words in the other conditions. So, a clear benefit of drawing the words was found.
Drawing vs. Writing: Word Pairs
In the second experiment, participants studied a list of unrelated word pairs. This time each word pair presentation was followed by one of two prompts: drawing a picture illustrating both words of the pair versus writing out the word pair out a couple of times. Memory performance on the final test showed a benefit of the drawing strategy compared to the writing strategy.
