From experience to meaning…

This study doesn’t surprise me that much. Everybody who read about dual coding knows how drawing can help retention. This study adds to this knowledge by showing that older adults who take up drawing could enhance their memory. Do note while the 3 experiments are interesting and relevant, they only used 3 times 2 groups of 24 participants (24 students, 24 older people).

From the press release:

Researchers from the University of Waterloo found that even if people weren’t good at it, drawing, as a method to help retain new information, was better than re-writing notes, visualization exercises or passively looking at images.

“We found that drawing enhanced memory in older adults more than other known study techniques,” said Melissa Meade, PhD candidate in cognitive neuroscience at Waterloo. “We’re really encouraged by these results and are looking into ways that it can be used to help people with dementia, who experience rapid declines in memory and language function.”

As part of a series of studies, the researchers asked both young people and older adults to do a variety of memory-encoding techniques and then tested their recall. Meade conducted this study with Myra Fernandes a Psychology professor in cognitive neuroscience at Waterloo and recent UW PhD graduate Jeffrey Wammes.

The researchers believe that drawing led to better memory when compared with other study techniques because it incorporated multiple ways of representing the information–visual, spatial, verbal, semantic and motoric.

“Drawing improves memory across a variety of tasks and populations, and the simplicity of the strategy means that it can be used in many settings,” said Myra Fernandes.

As part of the studies, the researchers compared different types of memory techniques in aiding retention of a set of words, in a group of undergraduate students and a group of senior citizens. Participants would either encode each word by writing it out, by drawing it, or by listing physical attributes related to each item. Later on after performing each task, memory was assessed. Both groups showed better retention when they used drawing rather than writing to encode the new information, and this effect was especially large in older adults.

Retention of new information typically declines as people age, due to deterioration of critical brain structures involved in memory such as the hippocampus and frontal lobes. In contrast, we know that visuospatial processing regions of the brain, involved in representing images and pictures, are mostly intact in normal aging, and in dementia. “We think that drawing is particularly relevant for people with dementia because it makes better use of brain regions that are still preserved, and could help people experiencing cognitive impairment with memory function,” said Meade. “Our findings have exciting implications for therapeutic interventions to help dementia patients hold on to valuable episodic memories throughout the progression of their disease”

Abstract of the study:

Background/Study Context. In a recent study, drawing pictures relative to writing words at encoding has been shown to benefit later memory performance in young adults. In the current study, we sought to test whether older adults’ memory might also benefit from drawing as an encoding strategy. Our prediction was that drawing would serve as a particularly effective form of environmental support at encoding as it encourages a more detailed perceptual representation.

Methods. Participants were presented 30 nouns, one at a time, and asked to either draw a picture or repeatedly write out the word, which was followed by a free recall test for all words (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, we added an elaborative processing task in which we asked participants to list physical characteristics of the objects. In Experiment 3, we probed recognition memory for the words.

Results. Of the words recalled in Experiment 1, a larger proportion had been drawn than written at encoding, and this effect was larger in older relative to younger adults. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that drawing improves memory in both younger and older adults more than does an elaborative encoding task consisting of listing descriptive characteristics of the target nouns. In Experiment 3, older and younger adults drew or wrote out words at encoding, and subsequently provided Remember-Know-New recognition memory decisions. We showed that drawing reduced age-related differences in Remember responses.

Conclusions. We suggest that incorporating visuo-perceptual information into the memory trace, by drawing pictures at study, increases reliance of the memory trace on visual sensory regions, which are relatively intact in normal aging, relative to simply writing out or elaborately encoding words. Overall, results indicate that drawing is a highly valuable form of environmental support that can significantly enhance memory performance in older adults.

Have I told you already that science can be messy? If not, welcome to this blog! 2 years ago I posted this replication of the infamous pencil in the mouth study. It has become one of the more well known examples of the replication crisis. But it also spurred a lot of debate. Was the replication really a true replication of the original research?

A new study adds fuel to this debate as it failed to replicate the failed replication. Ok, just kidding, the study is actually showing the original study might have been correct! But we can’t be really sure, as it’s actually even more complicated:

The paradigm diverged from the original facial feedback experiment in several respects. They include the classroom setting in which testing was conducted; the fact that each participant rated two cartoons rather than four; the fact that it featured a within-subjects rather than between- subjects design; the absence of a cover story about piloting a study for future research regarding populations with disabilities to explain the manipulation; the use of a 7-point scale rather than a 10-point scale; the fact that the experiment was part of a classroom lecture about learning (specifically, about the acquisition of conditioned associations) rather than following a line- drawing task; the fact that correct positioning of pens could be monitored only within the limits of a group setting; the fact that participants selected but did not write down their ratings with their pens in their mouths; and the lack of individualized follow-up with participants regarding their beliefs about the experiment, precluding exclusion of participants for suspicions regarding the study goals. (It is notable, however, that when the instructor presented students with their results in the ensuing class, the most commonly verbalized reaction was surprise or disbelief that the manipulation could have possibly affected their ratings.)

It seems the only thing that we seem to know for sure is that more research is needed…

Abstract of this new study:

The facial feedback effect refers to the influence of unobtrusive manipulations of facial behavior on emotional outcomes. That manipulations inducing or inhibiting smiling can shape positive affect and evaluations is a staple of undergraduate psychology curricula and supports theories of embodied emotion. Thus, the results of a Registered Replication Report indicating minimal evidence to support the facial feedback effect were widely viewed as cause for concern regarding the reliability of this effect. However, it has been suggested that features of the design of the replication studies may have influenced the study results. Relevant to these concerns are experimental facial feedback data collected from over 400 undergraduates over the course of 9 semesters. Circumstances of data collection met several criteria broadly recommended for testing the effect, including limited prior exposure to the facial feedback hypothesis, conditions minimally likely to induce self-focused attention, and the use of moderately funny contemporary cartoons as stimuli. Results yielded robust evidence in favor of the facial feedback hypothesis. Cartoons that participants evaluated while holding a pen or pencil in their teeth (smiling induction) were rated as funnier than cartoons they evaluated while holding a pen or pencil in their lips (smiling inhibition). The magnitude of the effect overlapped with original reports. Findings demonstrate that the facial feedback effect can be successfully replicated in a classroom setting and are in line with theories of emotional embodiment, according to which internal emotional states and relevant external emotional behaviors exert mutual influence on one another. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).