Does Drawing Make You Smarter? What Art Does for Memory and IQ
Does drawing make you smarter? No study shows it raises IQ, and art classes do not lift reading or maths scores. Drawing does help you remember what you draw.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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There is no evidence that drawing makes you smarter in the sense of raising IQ, and when arts education has been tested in controlled studies, it has not improved children's reading or mathematics. The largest randomized trial, with 10,548 students in 42 Houston schools, found a gain of 0.13 standard deviations in writing scores and no effect on maths, reading or science, while a separate line of laboratory experiments shows that drawing something does help you remember it.
Drawing is often recommended as a way to train the brain. This article covers what drawing does to memory, what happens when schools add art lessons, what the research on spatial skills and older adults shows, and why people who draw well can seem especially intelligent.
The drawing effect: you remember what you draw
The strongest and most consistent finding about drawing and cognition concerns memory, and it was established by Jeffrey Wammes, Melissa Meade and Myra Fernandes at the University of Waterloo.
• Seven experiments: In their 2016 paper, students saw lists of words and either drew a quick picture of each word or wrote the word out repeatedly. Drawn words were recalled better than written words in every experiment. The advantage held when people had less time to draw, when the lists were longer, and when each person used only one method. It could not be explained by deeper thinking about the words, by imagining the objects, or by the fact that pictures are easier to remember than words.
• Older adults: In a follow-up with younger and older adults, drawing helped both groups, and the benefit was larger for the older adults. Drawing also beat listing the physical features of each object, a technique known to improve memory. The authors suggest that drawing leans on visual processing, which holds up relatively well with age.
• Beyond word lists: A review by the same group reported that the benefit extends to pictures and to textbook definitions, and that drawing outperformed writing, visualizing, and even tracing the same items.
This is a real effect, but it is a study strategy for specific material. It improves memory for the items you drew. The researchers did not measure IQ, and nothing in these experiments suggests that the capacity to remember new material grows with practice. Deliberately drawing the content is also different from absent-minded doodling, which does not carry the same benefit.
Do art lessons raise IQ or grades?
The idea that art makes children smarter has been tested many times, mostly by asking whether students who take arts classes do better in school.
• The first big reviews: In 2000, Ellen Winner and Monica Cooper pooled studies of arts education and academic achievement published between 1950 and 1998. Students who studied the arts did have higher achievement on average, but the studies with experimental designs showed no causal effect on verbal or mathematical achievement. The title of their paper summarized it: "Mute those claims."
• The OECD review: In 2013, Winner and colleagues reviewed the evidence again for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They found no evidence that training in visual arts improves overall academic skills or literacy. Two correlational studies linked visual arts study with stronger geometrical reasoning, but the authors noted that causality had not been established.
• The Houston trial: Daniel Bowen and Brian Kisida evaluated a program in which 42 Houston schools were assigned by lottery to receive extra arts education through local arts organizations. Students in those schools gained 0.13 standard deviations in writing scores, roughly 2 points if the writing test had a standard deviation of 15. There were no effects on maths, reading or science scores. Only 16% of the arts programming was visual art; most was theatre and music.
• The museum trial: When the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Arkansas, school groups were chosen for free tours by lottery. Students who visited wrote more thoughtful essays about a painting they had never seen, an effect of about 0.09 standard deviations, larger for students from rural or high-poverty schools. That is an improvement in looking at and writing about art, which is near transfer.
These results fit the broader pattern in research on training. Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet's reviews found that when practice in one skill is tested against a proper control group, the benefits to distant abilities such as general intelligence shrink to almost nothing. Getting better at drawing makes you better at drawing. The same pattern appears for music lessons, as the article on musicians and IQ describes.
Drawing, spatial skills and the ageing brain
The most plausible place for drawing to transfer is spatial ability, because drawing requires judging shapes, angles and proportions.
• Spatial training works: David Uttal and colleagues analyzed 217 studies of spatial training and found an average improvement of 0.47 standard deviations, about 7 points on a 15-point scale. The gains lasted and transferred to other spatial tasks. The studies tested many kinds of training, and the outcomes were spatial tests, not IQ. Spatial ability is one part of intelligence, explained further in the article on visual-spatial reasoning, and a gain on one part is far from a gain in overall IQ.
• An art class for retirees: In a German study, 28 recently retired adults were randomly assigned to 10 weeks of either an art-making class or museum sessions discussing art. Brain scans showed greater changes in functional connectivity in the art-making group, and these were related to scores on a resilience questionnaire. The study had 14 people per group and did not measure intelligence or any cognitive test.
• Art in late life: In the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging, 256 adults aged 85 and older were followed for about four years. Those who reported artistic activities in both midlife and late life had a lower risk of mild cognitive impairment (hazard ratio 0.27). This is observational, and people whose thinking is already slipping may give up hobbies, so the direction of cause is unclear.
Why people who draw well seem smart
The impression that artists are clever has some basis, but it mostly reflects who chooses to draw.
• Children's figure drawings: Psychologists have long used children's drawings of people to estimate intelligence. Drawing skill at age 4 correlates modestly with later IQ, but figure-drawing tests are poor substitutes for an IQ test, as the doodling article covers.
• Personality: Gregory Feist's meta-analysis of personality and creativity found that artists score higher than non-artists on openness to experience and lower on conscientiousness. Openness is also the Big Five trait most consistently linked with IQ, according to Phillip Ackerman and Eric Heggestad's meta-analysis, so people drawn to art may differ in ability before they ever take a class.
• Selection into art: Students who take art electives and adults who draw for pleasure tend to have more education and more free time, and their families often have more money for lessons and materials. A comparison of artists and non-artists that does not measure ability first cannot separate these effects from anything drawing itself does.
Drawing skill also depends heavily on training and practice, which is why a skilled draughtsman and a high scorer on an IQ test are often different people. Drawing well is valuable in its own right, without needing to be a sign of high IQ.
Frequently asked questions
Does drawing make you smarter?
No study shows that drawing raises IQ. Controlled studies of arts education found no effect on reading or maths, though drawing does help you remember the specific things you draw.
Does drawing improve memory?
Yes, for the material you draw. In seven experiments, words that people drew were recalled better than words they wrote out, and the benefit was larger in older adults.
Is drawing good for your brain?
It can be a rewarding activity, and older adults who keep artistic hobbies have a lower risk of cognitive impairment. Those studies are observational, so they do not show that drawing caused the difference.
Is being good at drawing a sign of intelligence?
Only weakly. Young children's figure drawings correlate modestly with IQ, but in adults drawing skill is mostly a separate talent built by practice.
Does drawing improve spatial reasoning?
Possibly. Spatial skills respond well to training, and art students tend to do better on geometry, but no large trial has shown that drawing lessons themselves raise spatial test scores.
The takeaway
Drawing does not make you smarter in any way that research has measured. Art lessons have not improved reading or maths scores in controlled studies, and the gains that do appear, in writing about art or in the memory of drawn items, stay close to the task. Drawing is still a good way to remember what you study and a worthwhile skill in its own right. If you want to know where your reasoning ability stands, you can take a full-length online IQ test.
References
1. Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2016). The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9), 1752-1776. [doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494](. doi.org
2. Meade, M. E., Wammes, J. D., & Fernandes, M. A. (2018). Drawing as an encoding tool: Memorial benefits in younger and older adults. Experimental Aging Research, 44(5), 369-396. [doi.org/10.1080/0361073X.2018.1521432](. doi.org
3. Fernandes, M. A., Wammes, J. D., & Meade, M. E. (2018). The surprisingly powerful influence of drawing on memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(5), 302-308. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721418755385](. doi.org
4. Winner, E., & Cooper, M. (2000). Mute those claims: No evidence (yet) for a causal link between arts study and academic achievement. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34(3/4), 11-75. [doi.org/10.2307/3333637](. doi.org
5. Winner, E., Goldstein, T. R., & Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2013). Art for art's sake? The impact of arts education. OECD Publishing. [doi.org/10.1787/9789264180789-en](. doi.org
6. Bowen, D. H., & Kisida, B. (2023). Investigating the causal effects of arts education. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 42(3), 624-647. [doi.org/10.1002/pam.22449](. doi.org
7. Bowen, D. H., Greene, J. P., & Kisida, B. (2014). Learning to think critically: A visual art experiment. Educational Researcher, 43(1), 37-44. [doi.org/10.3102/0013189X13512675](. doi.org
8. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515-520. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760](. doi.org
9. Uttal, D. H., Meadow, N. G., Tipton, E., Hand, L. L., Alden, A. R., Warren, C., & Newcombe, N. S. (2013). The malleability of spatial skills: A meta-analysis of training studies. Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 352-402. [doi.org/10.1037/a0028446](. doi.org
10. Bolwerk, A., Mack-Andrick, J., Lang, F. R., Dörfler, A., & Maihöfner, C. (2014). How art changes your brain: Differential effects of visual art production and cognitive art evaluation on functional brain connectivity. PLoS ONE, 9(7), e101035. [doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101035](. doi.org
11. Roberts, R. O., Cha, R. H., Mielke, M. M., Geda, Y. E., Boeve, B. F., Machulda, M. M., Knopman, D. S., & Petersen, R. C. (2015). Risk and protective factors for cognitive impairment in persons aged 85 years and older. Neurology, 84(18), 1854-1861. [doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000001537](. doi.org
12. Arden, R., Trzaskowski, M., Garfield, V., & Plomin, R. (2014). Genes influence young children's human figure drawings and their association with intelligence a decade later. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1843-1850. [doi.org/10.1177/0956797614540686](. doi.org
13. Ackerman, P. L., & Heggestad, E. D. (1997). Intelligence, personality, and interests: Evidence for overlapping traits. Psychological Bulletin, 121(2), 219-245. [doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.121.2.219](. doi.org
14. Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(4), 290-309. [doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0204_5](. doi.org
Hero image: Wooden mannequin, by Hannah Alkadi (Pixabay), CC0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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