The Influence of Drawing on Memory Formation: A Lesion-Based Approach

The hippocampus plays a critical role in the formation of contextually rich memories, with research indicating that distinct neuronal representations within the hippocampus produce the foundation of these memories. Therefore, the more distinct the memory representation at encoding, the stronger the memory trace. However, patients with focal damage to the hippocampus show impairment in this memory storage system and their memories are thus more vulnerable to interference. Drawing has recently been utilized as an encoding strategy that creates particularly distinct representations as it incorporates a range of modalities, such as motor, visual and verbal domains. Thus, the goal of this study was to determine whether patients with hippocampal amnesia could benefit from the mnemonic strategy of drawing. Two patients, BR and BL, who have hippocampal damage and their matched control samples (N = 10 for each patient) completed a testing session via videoconferencing where they were instructed to either draw or write down a list of 30 words. After a delay of 10 minutes, they completed unexpected free recall and recognition tasks. Both patients displayed enhanced performance for the words that they had drawn, as opposed to written, on measures of recall and recognition. As individuals with hippocampal amnesia live with severe memory deficits which impacts their day-to-day life, research on developing strategies to reduce their memory impairment is of upmost importance.