Drawing Photos Of Information Helps People Remember, Study Claims

For people having trouble remembering things, researchers now recommend drawing information to better remember them. A recent study revealed that memory is enhanced with visuals that people themselves drew.

According to Eureka Alert, researchers from the University of Waterloo found that sketching information help people remember these things later on. Lead author Jeffrey Wammes from the Department of Psychology said they placed drawing versus other strategies but it remained to be the most effective memory booster.

"We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding strategies, but drawing always came out on top," Wammes added. "We believe that the benefit arises because drawing helps to create a more cohesive memory trace that better integrates visual, motor and semantic information."

The researchers let students respondents draw single words or write it out repeatedly then asked them to recall the list in 60 seconds. Wammes said there was a "significant recall advantage" for the words which were sketched than those which were merely written.

"Participants often recalled more than twice as many drawn than written words," he added. The lead author also explained that they termed their finding as "the drawing effect" which can be very helpful to many people who are struggling with memorizing things.

Times of India said the research concluded that drawing was more effective than creating mental images, viewing photos or creating a list of physical characteristics. "In line with this, we showed that people still gained a huge advantage in later memory, even when they had just four seconds to draw their picture," Wammes added in the same report.

People who are not artistically gifted should not worry as researchers claim that the quality of the sketches did not matter. The study also showed that even if people are given a short time to draw, they can still remember what they have jotted down.

Since the study was only conducted with single words, researchers are still trying to discover if this can be applicable to phrases or even sentences. Wammes said they will further study the types of information this can be used.