Handwriting Vs. Typing: Debate Heats Up Over Which Is Best For The Brain

Last year, the journal Frontiers in Psychology published an article by Norwegian scientists that promoted the power of the pen. The researchers argued that as digital devices become increasingly commonplace, traditional ways of writing by hand are becoming progressively less important, despite it being a valuable way to learn and remember information.

In their study, the researchers analyzed brain activity in university students when they wrote by hand and when they typed on a keyboard. They ultimately found that the handwriting resulted in significantly more elaborate brain connectivity patterns than typing words. The results, they argued, had important implications for memory and learning, especially for children.

“Our findings suggest that the spatiotemporal pattern from visual and proprioceptive information obtained through the precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen, contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning”, the authors wrote.

“We urge that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting activities in school to establish the neuronal connectivity patterns that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning.”

The study was pretty impactful, catching the attention of media groups (including us) and the public alike, resulting it being covered by nearly 200 news outlets and receiving over 1,500 social media posts at time of writing. Overall, the success of this article demonstrated the public’s interest in this topic but also bolstered the idea that we can remember information better if we write it down.

However, two researchers in Spain and France have now published a response to this original article in the same journal. They take issue with the Norwegian study’s methodology and the limitations concerning their conclusions and interpretations.

Chiefly, they point out that the original study did not actually require the students to actually learn anything despite claiming that handwriting improves memory.

“Participants repeatedly wrote well-known words without any requirement for memory encoding, preventing any conclusions in terms of learning,” authors Svetlana Pinet and Marieke Longcamp write.

Moreover, given that the Norwegian study focused on adult participants, it is unclear how easily the effects can be translated to an educational setting with children.

“[D]rawing conclusions on learning processes in children in a classroom from a lab study carried out on a group of university students that did not include any type of learning seems slippery at best,” they add.

The authors of the rebuttal also argue that the conditions within the experiment were not really representative of typical ones someone would experience in the real world. In the original study, students wrote words from the game Pictionary with either digital pen on a screen or by typing on a keyboard. They were also connected to EEG devices that measured their brain activity.

These conditions are pretty alien to most people, but the act of writing was made even more unusual by the experiment’s requirements. When writing by hand, students were asked to write with the pen without lifting it from the screen, while typing was limited to their right index finger, which makes typing more difficult than how most people usually type.

“Changing habitual typing behavior to conform to the instructions might impact participants’ typing performance and associated brain activity through disruption of automatized control,” Pinet and Longcamp add.

While these comments challenge last year’s study, the researchers do acknowledge the importance of handwriting and learning.

“We wish to stress that putting into question [the Norwegian study′s] conclusions should not be taken as putting into question the importance of handwriting”, they write.

“Previous evidence does support a beneficial role of handwriting training on single letter recognition, word recall and word reading and writing, although long-term consequences remain to be evaluated.”

They add that they agree there needs to be more concerted research into the implications of writing practices for learning and memory, especially now that handwriting is receiving less attention.

Responding to this criticism, Audrey Van der Meer, one of the authors of the Norwegian study, told The Hechinger Report that the critics promote keyboards in education, so there could be an element of bias here. However, she accepts that her study did not include any learning tasks for her student subjects.

Van der Meer is currently carrying out new research into learning among teenagers who were asked to take notes using a pen or keyboard. The students were then subjected to the same exam and their results were assessed. At present, Van der Meer sees evidence that those who wrote by hand appear to do better than their typing peers, but her analysis is ongoing, and the results have not yet been published.

So the question of how important handwriting is for learning and memory remains unanswered. We eagerly await the results of any future studies to support or refute current ideas.

The rebuttal to the Norwegian article is published in Frontiers in Psychology.