Author(s)

Makana Tsutsui¹, Masako Notoya², Daisuke Kimura³, Ken Nakatani³, Takashi Fujita⁴, Nobuyuki Sunahara⁵, Katsumi Inoue⁵

¹Japanese Red Cross Kanazawa Hospital, Ishikawa, Japan.
²Health Medical Department, Kytogakuen University, Kyoto, Japan.
³Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Kansai University of Welfare Sciences, Osaka, Japan.
⁴Division of Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Care and Rehabilitation, Seijoh University, Aichi, Japan.
⁵School of Health Sciences, College of Medical, Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences, Kanazawa University, Ishikawa, Japan.

Although many studies have explored the utility of tracing as a rehabilitation approach for patients with aphasia and alexia and for Japanese patients with various disabilities, this may be the first study to demonstrate the superiority of tracing over copying for enhancing long-term memory. We investigated the utility of tracing as a memory storage method. Young and elderly participants learned a figure from the Rey-Osterrieth complex figure test by copying or tracing its outline. They were asked to reproduce the figure after 3 min and 3 days. Although the copying group performed better than the tracing group in immediate recall after 3 min, the performance of the tracing and copying groups after 3 days was similar. Among younger participants, the tracing group achieved higher scores than the copying group after 3 days; however, the difference was not statistically significant. Copying as a learning strategy has a substantial temporal gradient of memory loss; tracing may be more appropriate for improving long-term memory. This result could have considerable practical usefulness, e.g., among professionals who provide memory training for the elderly. Tracing, which uses visuomotor memory, is acquired earlier than transcription. Tracing may be effective for rehabilitation because it is a developmentally appropriate approach to early instruction.

Visual Memory, Learning, Long-Term Memory

Tsutsui, M. , Notoya, M. , Kimura, D. , Nakatani, K. , Fujita, T. , Sunahara, N. and Inoue, K. (2017) Utility of Tracing as a Memory Storage Method. World Journal of Neuroscience, 7, 216-222. doi: 10.4236/wjns.2017.72017.