[maegul]

Superficial take IMO.

Don’t need a selective pressure for a cognitive process to work in a particular way. You just need a selective pressure for the cognitive skill and for the way that skill works to at least not have a pressure against it, biology being full of engineering compromises.

Learning well with handwriting, IMO, has little to do with hands specifically, but memory and understanding in general, where the spatially situated product of the action (on a specific piece of paper used and then kept in a specific place) taken in a properly free form manner with much more analogue detail (paper is a blank canvas and handwriting will have nuance throughout a piece of writing) that most likely also slows you down and forces a huge number of little decisions all facilitate the task of memorisation and recall.

That spatially attendant information assists memory seems to me very plausibly consistent with primate evolution where most if not all tasks benefiting from memory would have had such information as either a fundamental component or readily associated.

For similar reasons, I think there’s something to be said for sorting important information in physical books on shelves, where the location of information in the physical space can aid recall.

I think it’s easy to forget just how weirdly disconnected and abstract the computer interface is from everything else we use in the world.

Ideally, computers ought to be driving at optimising for humans rather than merely what works well for the tech. I think that’s been left behind too much.

[BurningFrog]

My guess/impression is that the act of writing something down passes the information through different parts of the brain, and then you have two independent memories of the facts.

[wizofaus]

But why shouldn't the same be true of typing?

(I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to perform in the real world, in some ways it's surprising we're able to become so competent at it, though obviously our ability to make finely tuned manipulations with our fingers is a huge part of our evolutionary success).

[maegul]

Well like I said above, I think the spatial details of where you’re writing and where the thing you’re writing on is located and the details of the spatial arrangement of your writing itself are all part of it.

[wizofaus]

A plausible hypothesis, sure, but not much more. It'd be interesting to actually investigate it properly.

[maegul]

For sure!

Though I'd also wonder if it's a tad more than a hypothesis given what we already know about memory both scientifically and, perhaps, from practices people have developed over time to aid memory. I don't know all that nearly well enough to put together the case, but the "memory palace" technique, which is ancient and apparently "tried and true" seems like a striking demonstration of the the basic spatial idea. If there's truth to that, I'd say my suggestion could be reframed as a strategy for using handwriting to aid memory rather than a mere hypothesis.

Regarding the "slowing down" aspect, as others have mentioned too, I'd argue again that this could be couched directly in well established ideas and understandings ... chiefly, I'd imagine, the processes of repetition, practice and synthesis that are essentially common knowledge. The slowed down process of deciding what you're going to write and how probably forces you into a cognitive loop that goes beyond the mere recording of information toward repetition and synthesis. My experience with typing is that the urge to simply record verbatim is more natural to the medium.

[BurningFrog]

I'd speculate the bigger more elaborate effort of handwriting produces a stronger memory.