The benefit (and cost) of drawing as an encoding strategy

Drawing, as an encoding strategy for to-be-remembered words, has previously been shown to provide robust memory benefits. In the current study, we investigated the effect of drawing on false memory endorsements during a recognition test. We found that while drawing led to higher hit rates relative to writing (Experiment 1) and creating visual mental imagery (Experiment 2), it also led to higher false alarm (FA) rates to critical lures in a variant of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. When compared with an encoding strategy requiring listing of object features (Experiment 3), drawing led to a lower FA rate. We suggest that drawing enhances memory by promoting recollection of rich visual contextual information during retrieval, and this leads to the unintended side effect of increasing FA rates to related information.