Drawing behaviour influences ongoing thought patterns and subsequent memory.

For millennia, humans have created drawings as a means of externalizing visual representations, and later, to aid communication and learning. Despite its cultural value, we understand little about the cognitive states elicited by drawing, and their downstream benefits. In two preregistered experiments, we explored these states; Undergraduate participants (Ns = 69, 60) encoded words by drawing or writing, periodically describing their thoughts using multi-dimensional experience sampling, a tool for characterizing the features of ongoing thought.

Inducing representational change in the hippocampus through real-time neurofeedback.

When you perceive or remember something, other related things come to mind, affecting how these competing items are subsequently perceived and remembered. Such behavioural consequences are believed to result from changes in the overlap of neural representations of these items, especially in the hippocampus. According to multiple theories, hippocampal overlap should increase (integration) when there is high coactivation between cortical representations.

Drawing as a versatile cognitive tool.

Drawing is a cognitive tool that makes the invisible contents of mental life visible. Humans use this tool to produce a remarkable variety of pictures, from realistic portraits to schematic diagrams. Despite this variety and the prevalence of drawn images, the psychological mechanisms that enable drawings to be so versatile have yet to be fully explored.

Foreground bias: Semantic consistency effects modulated when searching across depth.

When processing visual scenes, we tend to prioritize information in the foreground, often at the expense of background information. The foreground bias has been supported by data demonstrating that there are more fixations to foreground, and faster and more accurate detection of targets embedded in foreground. However, it is also known that semantic consistency is associated with more efficient search.

Slow and steady: Validating the rhythmic visual response task as a marker for attentional states.

A principal goal of attention research is to develop tasks with clear behavioral signatures of attentional fluctuations. Measures that index attentional states often fall under two broad umbrellas: decision tasks, in which participants make responses based on the changing requirements of each trial, and rhythm tasks, in which participants respond rhythmically to a uniform stimulus (e.g.

INDUCING REPRESENTATIONAL CHANGE IN THE HIPPOCAMPUS THROUGH REAL-TIME NEUROFEEDBACK.

When you perceive or remember one thing, other related things come to mind. This competition has consequences for how these items are later perceived, attended, or remembered. Such behavioral consequences result from changes in how much the neural representations of the items overlap, especially in the hippocampus.

Attention in hindsight: Using stimulated recall to capture dynamic fluctuations in attentional engagement.

Attentional engagement is known to vary on a moment-to-moment basis. However, few self-report methods can effectively capture dynamic fluctuations in attentional engagement over time. In the current paper, we evaluated the utility of stimulated recall, a method wherein individuals are asked to remember their subjective states while using a mnemonic cue, for the measurement of temporal changes in attentional engagement.

Examining the effect of expected test format and test difficulty on the frequency and mnemonic costs of mind wandering.

Mind wandering, generally defined as task-unrelated thought, has been shown to constitute between 30% and 50% of individuals' thoughts during almost every activity in which they are engaged. Critically, however, previous research has shown that the demands of a given task can lead to either the up- or down-regulation of mind wandering and that engagement in mind wandering may be differentially detrimental to future memory performance depending on learning conditions. The goal of the current research was to gain a better understanding of how the circumstances surrounding a learning episode affect the frequency with which individuals engage in off-task thought, and the extent to which these differences differentially affect memory performance across different test formats.

Drawing your way to an A: Long-lasting improvements in classroom quiz performance following drawing.

Generating a visual representation of a concept through drawing has been established as a valuable strategy for improving memory. While this has been demonstrated in both the laboratory and the real world, the findings are mixed in educational settings, perhaps due to variable operationalization of the drawing task. Participants are often provided additional scaffolding for their drawings, including instructions, training, or pre-drawn backgrounds.

The relation between trait flow and engagement, understanding, and grades in undergraduate lectures.

Background: Much work has focused on inattention in the classroom, examining how episodes of task-unrelated thought (i.e., mind wandering) and engagement with various forms of media (e.

Drawing and memory: Using visual production to alleviate concreteness effects.

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.

Relating Visual Production and Recognition of Objects in Human Visual Cortex.

Drawing is a powerful tool that can be used to convey rich perceptual information about objects in the world. What are the neural mechanisms that enable us to produce a recognizable drawing of an object, and how does this visual production experience influence how this object is represented in the brain? Here we evaluate the hypothesis that producing and recognizing an object recruit a shared neural representation, such that repeatedly drawing the object can enhance its perceptual discriminability in the brain. We scanned human participants ( = 31; 11 male) using fMRI across three phases of a training study: during training, participants repeatedly drew two objects in an alternating sequence on an MR-compatible tablet; before and after training, they viewed these and two other control objects, allowing us to measure the neural representation of each object in visual cortex.

Drawing improves memory: The importance of multimodal encoding context.

Memory is critical to the human experience, and more than a century of empirical work has been devoted to understanding its function and various means by which it can be strengthened. This literature has uncovered a long list of encoding techniques that reliably improve memory and yet little is known about the driving cognitive processes that are common to these techniques. To better understand how these diverse encoding techniques might enhance memory, we examine the mnemonic benefits of drawing, along with several related encoding techniques.

Comparing the influence of doodling, drawing, and writing at encoding on memory.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the extent to which doodling, which we define as drawing that is semantically unrelated to to-be-remembered information, enhances memory performance. In Experiment 1, participants heard auditorily presented lists of categorized words. They were asked to either doodle, draw a picture of, or write out, each item while listening to the target words.

Drawing as an Encoding Tool: Memorial Benefits in Younger and Older Adults.

Unlabelled: 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.

Drawing enhances item information but undermines sequence information in memory.

Drawing a picture of the referent of a word produces considerably better recall and recognition of that word than does a baseline condition, such as repeatedly writing the word, a phenomenon referred to as the drawing effect. Although the drawing effect has been the focus of much recent research, it is not yet clear what underlies the beneficial effects of drawing to memory. In 3 experiments, we explored the roles of item and order information following drawing versus silent reading and produced 2 important findings.

Task preparation as a mnemonic: The benefits of drawing (and not drawing).

Creating a visual representation of an item through drawing affords that item a substantive memory benefit, relative to several control tasks. Recent findings demonstrate the robustness of this drawing effect across several stimulus classes, irrespective of encoding time, setting, age group, or memory measure. The advantage for drawn information has been attributed to the integrated contributions of at least three components of visual production through drawing, which can independently facilitate memory: elaborative, motoric, and pictorial.

On the Clock: Evidence for the Rapid and Strategic Modulation of Mind Wandering.

We examined the hypothesis that people can modulate their mind wandering on the basis of their expectations of upcoming challenges in a task. To this end, we developed a novel paradigm in which participants were presented with an analog clock, via a computer monitor, and asked to push a button every time the clock's hand was pointed at 12:00. Importantly, the time at which the clock's hand was pointed at 12:00 was completely predictable and occurred at 20-s intervals.

Creating a recollection-based memory through drawing.

Drawing a picture of to-be-remembered information substantially boosts memory performance in free-recall tasks. In the current work, we sought to test the notion that drawing confers its benefit to memory performance by creating a detailed recollection of the encoding context. In Experiments 1 and 2, we demonstrated that for both pictures and words, items that were drawn by the participant at encoding were better recognized in a later test than were words that were written out.

Learning terms and definitions: Drawing and the role of elaborative encoding.

Traditionally, students adopt the strategy of taking written notes when attending a class or learning from a textbook in educational settings. Informed by previous work showing that learning by doing improves memory performance, we examined whether drawing to-be-remembered definitions from university textbooks would improve later memory, relative to a more typical strategy of rote transcription. Participants were asked to either write out the definition, or to draw a picture representative of the definition.

Wandering minds and wavering goals: Examining the relation between mind wandering and grit in everyday life and the classroom.

Here we examined the relation between mind wandering and the personality trait of 'grit.' Our hypothesis was that because mind wandering leads to a disruption of momentary goal completion, the tendency to mind wander might be inversely related to the completion of long-term goals that require sustained interest and effort (i.e.

The residual protective effects of enactment.

Research has demonstrated the importance of the quality of initial retrieval events (Test 1) for performance on later memory tests (Test 2). We explored whether enacting words at encoding, relative to simply reading them, provided protection against the detrimental effects of a degraded retrieval experience, through the addition of motor processing to the extant memory representation. Participants encoded a mixed list of enacted and read words, then completed Test 1, and a later Test 2.

Autobiographical and episodic memory deficits in mild traumatic brain injury.

Those who have suffered a concussion, otherwise known as a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), often complain of lingering memory problems. However, there is little evidence in the behavioral literature reliably demonstrating memory deficits. Thus, in the present study, cognitive profiles including measures of general executive functioning and processing speed, as well as episodic and semantic memory were collected in younger and older adult participants with or without a remote (>1year prior to testing) mTBI.