Drawing and memory: Using visual production to alleviate concreteness effects
- PDF / 629,194 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 12 Downloads / 213 Views
BRIEF REPORT
Drawing and memory: Using visual production to alleviate concreteness effects Brady R.T. Roberts 1
&
Jeffrey D. Wammes 2
Accepted: 26 August 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Countless experiments have been devoted to understanding techniques through which memory might be improved. Many strategies uncovered in the literature are thought to act via the integration of contextual information from multiple distinct codes. However, the mnemonic benefits of these strategies often do not remain when there is no clear link between a word and its multisensory referent (e.g., in abstract words). To test the importance of this link, we asked participants to encode target words (ranging from concrete to abstract) either by drawing them, an encoding strategy recently proven to be reliable in improving memory, or writing them. Drawing provides a compelling test case because while other strategies (e.g., production, generation) shift focus to existing aspects of to-be-remembered information, drawing may forge a link with novel multisensory information, circumventing shortcomings of other memory techniques. Results indicated that while drawing’s benefit was slightly larger for concrete stimuli, the effect was present across the spectrum from abstract to concrete. These findings demonstrate that even for highly abstract concepts without a clear link to a visual referent, memory is reliably improved through drawing. An exploratory analysis using a deep convolutional neural network also provided preliminary evidence that in abstract words, drawings that were most distinctive were more likely to be remembered, whereas concrete items benefited from prototypicality. Together, these results indicate that while the advantageous effects of drawing exist across all levels of concreteness, the memory benefit is larger when words are concrete, suggesting a tight coupling between the drawing benefit and visual code. Keywords Drawing effect . Concreteness . Abstract . Memory . Neural network
Introduction As we navigate the world before us, we are bombarded with incoming information. There is considerable variability in the vehicle of presentation (i.e., multiple sensory modes), the context in which we encounter the information, and the strategies we might use to encode information into memory. In Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01804-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Brady R.T. Roberts [email protected] Jeffrey D. Wammes [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
2
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
investigating the circumstances that precipitate robust (or alternatively, weak) memories, intrinsic stimulus qualities and encoding strategies are both highly relevant factors. However, these factors are frequently studied in isolation from one another. Understanding the interactions between the tw
Data Loading...
