Understanding Andrade (doodling)

The psychology being investigated:

1. Attention: refers to 'the concentration of mental effort on sensory or mental events'. Due to our limited
cognitive capacity, attention is often selective, meaning we direct our attention towards certain
information and filter out or ignore other input.
2. Memory: Memory refers to the encoding, storage and retrieval of information, potentially leading to
long-term retention. Often we try hard to remember information that we are told and make an effort to
focus. Information that we do not focus on but we can recall is called incidental memory, meaning
information that was remembered unintentionally, as is the case for so much of the input that we process
every day.

Background:
- 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.
- Research has shown that we perform less well when our
attention is divided between tasks. However, doodling
might aid concentration e.g. by reducing daydreaming so
that you stay focused.
- This idea is based on the working memory model. Daydreaming is linked to high arousal when we are bored
and it uses important cognitive processing resources (the central executive) so inhibits performance on tasks
that use this resource - including attention and memory.
- Alternatively doodling may help to maintain arousal e.g. by giving you something physical to do while you
think. It could raise arousal to help to keep you awake if you are sleepy or reduce arousal if you are agitated
because you are bored.

Aim:
- To investigate whether doodling improves our ability to pay attention to (or concentrate on) auditory
information (i.e. a message that is heard but not seen).
- To investigate whether doodling affects later recall of auditory information

Research Method:
Andrade used a laboratory experiment to see if doodling helped people to concentrate and remember information
from a mock (pretend) telephone message. The environment was not the normal place in which people would
respond to telephone messages and the situation was controlled.

Participants:
- Forty participants aged 18–55
- From the MRC Applied Psychology Unit participant panel were recruited for the study.
- They had all just finished another experiment (about giving directions) and the researchers asked whether
they would mind staying for another five minutes to complete one more study.
- As the participants were already part of a pre-existing and readily available group, they were an opportunity
sample.
- They were recruited in this way as the researcher wanted the participants to be ‘ready to go home’ to increase
their level of boredom during the task.
- All were paid a small fee for their time.
- They were randomly assigned to either the control group (n = 20 from which 18 were females and 2 males) or
the doodling group where they shaded printed shapes while listening to the telephone call (n =20 from which
17 were females and 3 males one participant did not doodle and was replaced). All participants monitored a
telephone message and then attempted to recall monitored and incidental information. Recall order was
counterbalanced across participants

Experimental Design:
The study used an independent measures design as the researchers compared the performance of two separate
groups of participants: an experimental/doodling group and a control group. Random allocation was used to
control for participant variables – for example, differences in memory that might have affected recall of the target
information.

Independent Variable:
The independent variable was whether the participants were allowed to doodle while they listened to the phone
message or not.

Dependent variables:
1. Monitoring accuracy: the number of correct names (out of eight) recorded while listening to the tape; the
researcher then deducted false alarms (i.e. wrong answers) from the total number of correct names to
give the final monitoring performance score.
2. Memory for monitored information: number of correct names recalled (out of eight) after false alarms
were deducted.
3. Memory for incidental information: number of correct places recalled (out of eight).

Materials:
A 2.5 minutes mock telephone message was recorded onto audio cassette tape in a fairly monotone voice at an
average speaking rate of 227 words per minute, and played at a comfortable listening volume. The script
included:

- eight people who were able to come to the party: Jane, William, Claire, Craig, Suzie, Jenny, Phil and Tony
- three people and one cat who could not come to the party: Nigel, John, Nicky and Ben the cat (Andrade refers
to these names as 'lures')
- eight places: London, Penzance, Gloucester, Colchester, Harlow, Ely, Peterborough and Edinburgh
- a lot of other irrelevant information

Participants in the doodling condition used a pencil to shade shapes of approximately 1 cm in diameter printed on
a piece of A4 paper, with 10 shapes per row and alternating rows of squares and circles. A 4.5 cm wide margin on
the left hand side allowed space for writing the target information. Control participants wrote the target
information on a lined piece of paper.

Procedure:
- Participants were tested individually in a quiet and visually dull room. All the participants were tested
individually.
- They were told: "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 definitely or probably be coming to the
party (excluding yourself). Ignore the names of those who can't come. Do not write anything else."
- Participants in the doodling condition were also asked to shade in the squares and circles while listening to the
tape. They were told "It doesn't matter how neatly or how quickly you do this it is just something to help
relieve the boredom.”
- Participants listened to the tape, which lasted two and a half minutes, and wrote down the names as
instructed.
- When the tape finished, the experimenter collected the response sheets, and engaged participants in
conversation for 1 minute including an apology for misleading them about the memory test.
- Half the participants were then asked to recall the names of party-goers and, when they had done that, then
of the places mentioned. The other half recalled the places first, followed by the names in reverse.
- During debriefing, participants were asked if they had suspected a memory test.

Two methodological features may have contributed to the beneficial effect of doodling by making the primary task
seem particularly boring. Participants were recruited and tested immediately after they had finished a colleague's
experiment. The intention was to test people when they were more prone to boredom than if they had just arrived
at the laboratory, although we have no evidence that this was the case. Everyone was told that the tape would be
dull, to discourage them from searching for something interesting in the material. The doodling task was described
as 'just something to relieve the boredom', to encourage participants to do it in a fairly naturalistic, automatic
fashion. The instructions contained no suggestion that it would improve cognitive performance. It remains to be
discovered whether the benefits of the shading task extend to naturalistic doodling

Analyzing the responses:

- The researchers included any names or places that they thought had simply been misheard as correct-for
example, Greg for Craig. Incorrect names were coded as false alarms, including extra names of non-party-
goers added into the message as 'lures'.
- Andrade included these lures to see whether people would write down all names mentioned instead of just
those going to the party. Words that were neither names nor places were marked incorrect - for example,
sister.

Results – amount of doodling:

The experimental group shaded an average of 36.3 shapes (range 3–110). One person did not shade any shapes so
they were replaced with another participant. No one in the control group doodled on their lined paper. Three
doodlers and four controls suspected a memory test. However, none said they actively tried to remember
information.

Results – monitoring accuracy:

Number of names correctly written Number of people Number of people
down while listening to the recording scoring full marks (8/8) making false alarms
Doodlers Mean: 7.8 with (0.4) SD 15/20 1
Non- doodlers Mean: 7.1 with (1.1) SD 9/20 5

The researchers calculated a final monitoring performance score by subtracting the number of false alarms from
the number of correct names (a wrong answer theoretically cancelled out a right answer). Other new names were
scored as false alarms, including names mentioned on the tape as lures. Responses such as 'sister' were ignored-
they were recorded as false alarms.

After these deductions, the results were as follows:

Monitoring performance score (maximum score of 8)

Mean Standard deviation
Doodlers 7.7 0.6
Non-doodlers 6.9 1.3
Monitoring performance in the doodling condition (mean = 7.7, SD = 0.6) was significantly higher than in the
control condition (mean 6.9, SD 1.3)

Results – recall performance:

Recall score (minus false alarms)

Monitored Incidental Total recall (monitored and
information (people’s information (place incidental information )
names) names) maximum score=16
Doodlers 5.1 (1.7) 2.4 (1.5) 7.5
Non-doodlers 4.0 (1.5) 1.8 (1.2) 5.8

Overall, participants in the doodling condition recalled a mean of 7.5 pieces of information (names and places),
29% more than the mean of 5.8 recalled by the control group.

Andrade was concerned about the number of people who indicated that they thought there might be a surprise
memory test (three in the doodling group and four in the control group). She ran the analysis again without their
data. The doodling group still performed significantly better than the controls on the recall task.

Conclusion:
Andrade concluded that doodling can improve concentration when listening, even when the task is rather boring.
She also concluded that it can help us to remember information better, even when we are not expecting to have to
do so.

Applications to everyday life:

Supporting students: Leading on from the point above, a further strength of this study is that it could be used as
evidence to support recommendations for teachers. Andrade’s study demonstrates that a second task such as
doodling can improve concentration, allowing us to remember more of what we have heard. This is an important
finding as many teachers punish their students for doodling in class, but this study suggests that raising awareness
of the benefits of doodling may be an important addition to teacher training.

Work environments: In workplaces where individuals need to focus on repetitive or uninteresting tasks,
incorporating doodling as a permissible activity might enhance productivity and information retention. Improve
performance for workers with mundane jobs like monitoring (e.g. security guards watching CCTV footage)

Support for Nature: Biological factors such as individual differences in cognitive abilities, attention spans, and
memory capacities could contribute to how participants engage in the doodling task. Genetic predispositions may
influence attentional processes and memory encoding. Additionally, the study does not directly address
neurological factors, but one could argue that variations in brain structures or neurotransmitter activity might
impact an individual's ability to concentrate and remember information, influencing the effectiveness of doodling.

Support for Nurture: The study focuses on the environmental stimulus of doodling and its impact on
concentration. Nurture factors, such as the participants' previous experiences with doodling or exposure to certain
environmental conditions, may shape their responses during the study. Doodling can also be considered a learned
behavior that individuals might pick up as a strategy to help maintain focus or relieve psychological stress.

Support for individual side: 9 subjects in the control group still got all monitored names correct - They have a
good attention span despite the boring task

Support for situational side: People who monitored the message without doodling did not score well - Due to
nature of task/ tasks like telephone monitoring are innately boring, leading to more daydreaming.
Evaluation:
Ethical issues
One weakness of Andrade’s study is that the participants were deceived about the true purpose of the study.
Before listening to the tape, they were told, ‘The tape is rather dull but that’s okay because I don’t want you to
remember any of it.’ This was not true as after the monitoring task participants were given a surprise test of recall
for not only the monitored information (the party-goers’ names) but also the incidental information (the place
names). Although deception was important (otherwise the participants would have concentrated more while
listening to the recording), it meant that participants were unable to give their fully informed consent.

Methodological issues - Reliability

A strength of Andrade’s study is the highly standardized procedure, which means the study can be easily
replicated. All participants listened to the same audio-recorded message, meaning the pace and tone were
identical; they all completed the study in the same quiet, dull room; and the interval between the monitoring and
recall tasks was always one minute. This level of consistency in the procedure means the study can be easily
replicated to see whether doodling really does improve concentration on a boring task.

Validity - Experimental method and design

A strength of the design was that the order in which the participants recalled the monitored information (names)
and incidental information (places) was counterbalanced. Half the participants in each group recalled the names
first then the places and the other half recalled places first and then names. This improved the validity of the
findings by minimizing the impact of order effects – increased memory for incidental and monitored information
could be attributed to the doodling and not the order in which they had been tested.

Operational definitions
A weakness of this study was the operational definition of doodling. Andrade standardized the nature of the
doodling by asking participants to shade 1 cm shapes, but in real life, doodling is generally a more creative and
spontaneous activity. This is important because the conclusion that doodling aids concentration and recall may not
be true for people who are allowed more freedom with regards to what, where and when they doodle. Low in
construct validity – accuracy of the operationalization of concepts

Confounding variables
A strength of the study is that Andrade checked to see whether any of her participants had detected the
deception. Eighteen per cent (three of the doodlers and four of the controls) said they had guessed there may be a
memory test afterwards, although none of these participants claimed to have tried to remember the information.
Andrade was concerned about the potential impact this might have had, so she re-analysed the data without their
scores and found the results to be the same. This was important because it helped to improve the overall validity
of her findings regarding the impact of doodling on concentration and memory.

The use of lures

A strength of Andrade’s telephone message was the use of the ‘lures’, meaning the names of people who were not
attending the party (e.g. Nigel, John and Nicky). Participants who were not really listening to the content of the
message and just listening out for names might have been ‘lured’ into writing an incorrect answer, which would
have reduced their overall monitoring performance score. This improved the validity of the findings as it ensured
Andrade was really measuring participants’ concentration as they had to listen carefully to what was said about
each person, and not just record all the names that they heard.

Objectivity
A weakness of the study was the decision to mark misheard words as correct. For example, in the monitoring task,
if a participant wrote Greg instead of Craig, this was recorded as correct, and then later in the recall task if they
wrote Greg again, this was also marked as correct. This is a weakness as an assumption is being made that certain
incorrect names are ‘mishearings’ and not false alarms, meaning the coding of answers is rather subjective.
Generalising beyond the sample
A weakness of this study is the overwhelming number of females in the study compared to males. Females made
up 87.5 per cent of the sample, meaning it can be described as ‘gynocentric’. This is important as it means that
generalizing the findings to males must be treated with caution, until the study has been replicated with a more
balanced sample.

Generalizing to everyday life

A weakness of this laboratory experiment is that the task was conducted in a highly controlled setting, which is
unlikely to reflect the additional challenges of listening to a voicemail in a real-world setting. For example, the
study took place in a quiet, under-stimulating room and the participants were asked to pretend that the speaker
on the tape was a friend of theirs. Had the participants been in their own homes surrounded by other family
members, pets, noisy neighbours and traffic sounds, doodling alone may not have been sufficient to help them
concentrate on the message. This suggests doodling may be more effective in the laboratory and that the findings
may lack ecological validity.