Physical Wellness

Why Drawing Pictures Can Boost Your Memory

By Sara Gale | Update Date: Apr 26, 2016 05:12 AM EDT

Drawing pictures are observed to help a person remember information more effectively than writing them down. Whether or not an individual has good artistic skills, drawing is sure to boost his memory, says a study published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments where the participants were asked to either draw or write a list of words given to them. It was found at the end of the study that participants were able to remember the information easily if they were made to draw the item than just writing them down, according to Life Hacker.

In one of the experiments, the study subjects were given a set of words and were asked to do different tasks including, visualizing the words, writing them down, observe the image of the words given, listing out the features of the words and draw a picture of them. Every time, participants were able to remember the item effectively when they drew than by any other method mentioned above.

"We discovered a significant recall advantage for words that were drawn as compared to those that were written," said Psychologist Jeffrey Wammes, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, according to Western Daily Press. "Participants often recalled more than twice as many drawn than written words. We labelled this benefit 'the drawing effect,' which refers to this distinct advantage of drawing words relative to writing them out," he added.

Wammes also noted that drawing helped people in enhancing their memory though the quality of their drawings wasn't too good. He also noted that though participants had just a few seconds to spare for every drawing, their memory of the item was long lasting. Drawing is believed to create more cohesive memory than the other techniques.

"Our results showed unequivocally drawing pictures of words presented during an incidental study phase provides a measurable boost to later memory performance relative to simply writing out the words, once or repeatedly," said Wammes. "Our results show drawing should be considered among the ranks of production, generation and enactment as a robust encoding manipulation that can, and does, improve memory performance dramatically."

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