Visual free recall and recognition in art students and laypeople

Artists and laypeople differ in their ability to create drawings. Previous research has shown that artists have improved memory performance during drawing, however, do they have better visual memory after the drawing is finished? In this paper, we focused on the question of differences in visual memory between art students and the general population in two studies. In Study 1, both groups studied a set of images and later drew them in a surprise drawing task. In Study 2, the drawings from Study 1 were evaluated by a different set of raters based on their drawing quality and similarity to the original image in order to link drawing evaluations with memory performance for both groups. Moreover, Study 2 has practical implications for the usage of drawing as a tool for measuring free recall - the majority of the drawings were recognizable, and raters showed a high level of consistency during their evaluation of the drawings. We found that both groups showed comparable visual memory performance, however, the artist group produced drawings of both better quality and similarity to the original image. On an individual level, participants whose drawings were rated as better showed higher recognition accuracy. However, we found that artists did not have better visual memory than laypeople.