Andrade.

(Doodling)
What Does Doodling do?
Background: General
• People sometimes daydream when presented with something
boring. This can lead to them not paying full attention to the
task at hand.
• It is quite common for people to doodle (draw abstract or
concrete symbols, patterns, figures, etc.) in ways not linked to
the primary task.
• Prior to this study it was not known whether the act of
doodling impairs attention processes by taking away
resources from the primary task or whether it actually aids
concentration towards the primary task, additionally
maintaining arousal.
Background: General
• It is common in research on attention to set participants
dual tasks to monitor performance. By doing this, we aim
to find out which cognitive processes are needed to
complete these tasks (or which processes contribute to
participants failing to complete them).

• However, Andrade believes that if the effects of boredom

are overlooked, then we cannot form any solid
conclusions. Could it be that doodling actually aids
concentration?
Background: Simply put

• If you do two things at once, will there will be internal

competition for which thing gets attention?

• But, is this true?

Aim:
• To test whether doodling aided concentration in a boring task.
Research method:
• The experiment was a Laboratory experiment. Andrade
recruited participants who were members of a medical
research council .

• Participants were recruited and tested immediately after they

had finished a colleague’s experiment.

• This means that they were opportunity selected NOT

volunteers
Sample:
• 40 members of the MRC Applied Psychology Unit

• Recruited from the general population and aged between 18 and

55 years.

• They were paid a small honorarium for taking part.

Procedure: Participants
• Participants were recruited just after finishing an unrelated
experiment (on ways of giving directions to different
locations) for another researcher, and asked if they would
mind spending another 5 minutes helping with research.

• The intention was to enhance the boredom of the task by

testing people who were already thinking about going home.

• They were randomly assigned to either the control group

(n = 20: 18 females and 2 males) or the doodling group
(n = 20: 17 females and 3 males).
Procedure: Design
• The researcher recorded a mock telephone message using a
cassette recorder. A fairly monotonous voice was used.

• The average speaking rate was 227 words per minute. The
recording was played at a ‘comfortable’ volume to listen to.

• The script included eight names of people who would be

attending a party alongside the names of three people and
one cat who would not attend. In addition, eight place
names were mentioned.
Procedure:
• As participants were asked to take part in this research just
after they had completed a study they had volunteered for,
they were already thinking about going home. It was hoped
that this would enhance the boredom of the task.

• Participants were placed in one of two groups: the doodling

condition or a control group.

• Those in the doodling group were asked to use a pencil to

shade different shapes that were 1 centimeter in diameter
on a piece of A4 paper.
Procedure:
• There were ten shapes per row.

• Each row alternated between squares and circles. There was

a left-hand side margin of 4.5 centimeters so that
participants could write down any target information.

• Participants in the control group were given a piece of lined

paper and a pencil.
Procedure:
• Participants were led into a quiet and visually dull room. All
participants were tested individually. The following
instructions were read out:

• “I am going to play you a tape. I want you to pretend that the

speaker is a friend who has telephoned you to invite you to a
party. The tape is rather dull but that’s okay because I don’t
want you to remember any of it. Just write down the names
of people who will be definitely coming to the party
(excluding yourself). Ignore the names of those who can’t
come. Do not write anything else.”
Procedure:
• Participants in the doodling condition were told that it did not
matter how neat they were when shading their doodle or
how quickly they did it.

• They were told that doing the shading was to relieve the
boredom of the task.

• They listened to the tape, which lasted 2.5 minutes, and

wrote down the names as requested. As soon as the
recording finished, the researcher collected participants’
sheets and talked to them for about one minute.
Procedure:
• They apologised for misleading them about the imminent
memory test.

• Half of the participants were then asked to recall as many

names as they could of the people attending the party.

• During the debriefing after the task participants were asked

if they had suspected that they were going to be given a
memory test.
Results:
• Those in the doodling group shaded a mean of 36.3 shapes
(range 3 – 110).

• One of the participants failed to doodle so was replaced.

• None of the participants in the control group doodled.

• Only three participants in the doodling condition and four in the

control group suspected a memory test.

• All claimed that they had then actively tried to remember the
information for the test.
Results:
Condition Average number of Number of false
correct names written alarms
down

Doodling 7.8 (SD = 0.4) 1

Control 7.1 (SD = 1.1) 5

• If a response indicated a plausible mishearing (e.g. Greg instead of

Craig), it was scored as being correct. New names not similar to the
ones given, names of people who could not attend or responses such
as “sister” were regarded as false alarms.
Results:
• Each participant was given a monitoring performance score. This
was calculated as the number of correct names written down
minus the number of false alarms.
• A total of 15 participants in the doodling group and 9 in the
control group scored maximum.

• Monitoring performance was significantly higher in the doodling

condition (mean = 7.7, SD = 0.6) than in the control condition
(mean = 6.9, SD = 1.3).
Results:
Full results.
Results:
• Overall, participants in the doodling condition recalled a mean of
7.5 pieces of correct information, compared to 5.8 recalled by
participants in the control condition.
• Overall, monitored names were recalled more than places
(p<0.001).
• Recall was significantly better for participants in the doodling
condition than for those in the control condition (p=0.02).
• When participants who had suspected a test were removed
from the analysis, there was still a significant difference (p=0.01).
Conclusions:
• Andrade concluded: “Participants who performed a shape-
shading task … concentrated better on a mock telephone
message than participants who listened to the message with no
concurrent task”

• This was seen in both the monitoring performance task and the
recall task. However, it was not clear whether the doodling lead
to better recall because doodlers happened to notice more
target information or whether it actually aided memory recall by
encouraging some deeper processing of the telephone message.
Evaluation:

GRAVE
Evaluation:

GRAVE Generalisability

This study has arguably poor generalisability, as the sample was from
a volunteer participant panel, therefore they may be qualitatively
different and the results may not reflect the population.
However, there was a good range of ages in the participant group.
Also the place names are not really relevant as a criticism as this
would be easy to adjust if we were to repeat in another country.
Evaluation:

GRAVE Reliability

This study’s reliability is good as they used a standardised procedure for

testing the participants which can easily be reproduced.
A script for the audiotape are available for replication.
Evaluation:

GRAVE Application

The results of this study show that it might be useful for students when
they are revising for an examination. If students have a podcast to listen
to or are reading notes, it could be useful for them to doodle at the same
time.
Evaluation:

GRAVE Validity

Validity is reasonable in this study as it appears effective in terms of its

stated aims. (face validity)
It lacks any measure of daydreaming.
Low in mundane realism.
Evaluation:

GRAVE Ethics

There was some deception in the study as the participants were told they
would not be expected to remember any of the information on the tape
recorded message.
The researchers apologised for this test and gave a full debrief at the end
of the study. This was a justifiable and necessary for the study to be
completed successfully.
Evaluation: Other considerations
The use of independent measures:
As different participants were used in the doodling and non-doodling
conditions, participant variables may have affected some of the results.

People in the doodling group may already happen to doodle a lot when
they concentrate in tasks. Also, participants in that group may have just
had a better memory compared to those in the non-doodling group.
These possible issues reduce the validity of the findings.
Evaluation: Other considerations
Individual and situational explanations:
Both sides of the argument can be seen in this study. In terms of
individual explanations, participants may have used a similar strategy
before or have a personality type that requires extra stimulation when
processing information (e.g. some may be extroverts).

In terms of situational explanations, the process of doodling in the given

situation could have caused the improvement in recall rather than it
being due to the individual: that is, the act of doodling is what helps
people retain information.
Kahoot!
Play a Kahoot game on the Andrade study:
https://create.kahoot.it/share/andrade-doodling/56defc06-f659-45e0-
a122-7d5abcfa394f
 More resources for CIE A/S
Psychology (9990) can be found at:
www.mrgregoryonline.com
Research methods Biological
Issues and debates Cognitive
Approaches Learning
Statistics Social