Moving Away from Verbal-based Measures of Cognition: Using Drawing to Measure Event Comprehension and Memory
Nonverbal communication measures are currently utilized to assess cognition in certain clinical populations (e.g., clock-drawing test for dementia patients), but these measures are often used for diagnoses rather than to measure complex cognition (i.e., memory, comprehension, etc.). Measures that do not rely on verbal abilities are needed to avoid potential barriers and provide all individuals with ways of expressing their comprehension and memory. Our work uses drawing, rather than verbal reports, to assess event comprehension and memory. Participants will watch film clips and then drew comics of each narrative. Drawings will be scored using an action coding scheme to identify narrative goals (i.e., A1 units/small goals and A2 units/large goals) within each panel. Comprehension for the film clips, measured by the comic drawing scores, will be compared to working memory and free recall data to evaluate the psychometric properties of our drawing measure and to identify potential relationships between standard measures of cognition and our proposed drawing method.
Figure 1.
Example of a comic drawn in the Comic task. The participant drew the required 4-panels and described what was happening in each.
Associated Presentations/Publications
Simonson, T.L., Hubbell, I., & Bailey, H. R. (2022, November). Moving Away from Verbal-based Measures of Cognition: Using Drawing to Measure Event Comprehension and Memory. Poster Presentation at Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
Simonson, T.L., Hubbell, I., McGatlin, K. C., & Bailey, H. R. (2023, April). Moving Away from Verbal-based Measures of Cognition: Using Drawing to Measure Event Comprehension and Memory. Submitting as a talk for Mid-western Psychological Association Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Simonson, T. L. Hubbell, I., McGatlin, K. C., & Bailey, H. R. (In preparation). Cognition in drawing special edition, Memory & Cognition.
