Effectiveness of production and drawing as encoding techniques on recall using mixed- and pure-list designs

We compared the benefit of production and drawing on recall of concrete and abstract words, using mixed- and pure-list designs. We varied stimulus and list types to examine whether the memory benefit from these strategies was sustained across these manipulations. For all experiments, the memory retrieval task was free recall. In Experiment 1, participants studied concrete and abstract words sequentially, with prompts to either silently-read, read aloud, write, or draw each target (intermixed). Reading aloud, writing, and drawing improved recall compared to silent reading, with drawing leading to the largest boost. Performance, however, was at floor in all but the drawing condition. In Experiment 2, the number of targets was reduced, and each strategy (between-subjects) was compared to silent-reading. We eliminated floor effects and replicated results from Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, we manipulated strategy in a pure-list-design. The drawing benefit was maintained while that from production was eliminated. In all experiments, recall was higher for concrete than abstract words that were drawn; no such effect was found for words produced. Results suggest that drawing facilitates memory by enhancing semantic elaboration, whereas the production benefit is largely perceptually based. Importantly, the memory benefit conferred by drawing at encoding, unlike production, cannot be explained by a distinctiveness account as it was relatively unaffected by study design.