Andrade study 2009

• Doodling is a way of passing the time when bored by a lecture or telephone call
• Doodling


  Can improve or hinder attention to the primary task
• Experiment procedure


  1. Participants monitored a monotonous mock telephone message

  2. Half of the group was assigned to a 'doodling' condition where they shaded printed shapes while listening

  3. Participants then attempted a surprise memory test
• Doodling group performed better on the monitoring task and recalled 29% more information on the memory test
• Doodling while working can be beneficial, unlike many dual task situations
• Future research could test whether doodling aids cognitive performance by reducing daydreaming
• Boredom is a very common experience and daydreaming is a common response
• A way of aiding concentration would have implications for psychological research methods as well as practical applications
• Dual task designs can fail to accurately pinpoint specific cognitive resources if the effects of boredom are overlooked
• This study is the first experimental test of the prediction that doodling aids concentration
• An auditory task was chosen so that doodling would compete minimally for modality-specific resources
• Participants were asked to shade in printed shapes, rather than doodle freely, to encourage a degree of absent mindedness akin to naturalistic doodling
• Participants in the doodling group shaded a mean of 36.3 of the printed shapes
• Monitoring performance was significantly higher in the doodling condition compared to the control condition
• Participants in the doodling condition recalled 29% more information overall compared to the control group
• Removing data from participants who suspected a memory test did not alter the pattern of results
• When monitoring performance was used as a covariate, the group effect became marginally significant, so it's unclear if doodling led to better recall simply because doodlers noticed more of the target names or if it aided memory directly by encouraging deeper processing
• Methodological features like testing participants immediately after another experiment and telling them the tape would be dull may have contributed to the beneficial effect of doodling by making the primary task seem particularly boring
• It remains to be discovered whether the benefits of the shading task extend to naturalistic doodling
• Possible mechanism for doodling effect

  Doodling may help stabilize arousal at an optimal level, keeping people awake or reducing the harmful effects of mind-wandering
• Doodling helps to stabilize arousal at an optimal level, keeping people awake or reducing the high levels of autonomic arousal often associated with boredom
• Doodling aids concentration by reducing daydreaming, in situations where daydreaming might be more detrimental to performance than doodling itself
• Daydreaming is linked with the generally high arousal levels seen during boredom, through increased activity in 'default' cortical networks
• Daydreaming occupies central executive resources and is detrimental to performance on tasks that compete for those resources
• The message-monitoring task would have encouraged daydreaming because the resource demand of the basic task was low and the task did not explicitly require retention of stimuli
• Doodling may have facilitated deeper processing of the stimuli and greater time-on-task, i.e. less daydreaming, without competing for the verbal processing resources needed for listening to the telephone message
• Doodling may have reduced daydreaming simply by adding a resource load to a rather undemanding task, or by selectively loading central executive resources
• Understanding the role of boredom and daydreaming, and tasks that alleviate them, would allow a more complete cognitive analysis of task performance in the laboratory and in real-life work and educational settings
• Ways of maintaining attention to task are also important in the context of depressive ruminations and worry, where mind wandering helps maintain dysphoric states
• Working memory


  Model used by many cognitive psychologists to explain how the brain and memory work

  
• The working memory can only handle a few pieces of information at a time
• Doodling


  • Not linked to primary task
  • May impair attention processes by taking away resources from primary task
  • May aid concentration towards primary task and maintain arousal
• Attention


  • Our mental ability to concentrate
  • Can be about focusing on a task and trying to exclude other stimuli that could interfere with concentration
  • Can also be being prepared for information being directed at you
• Memory


  • Our ability to store information that has been processed, then locate it and retrieve it at a later date to use it
  • Sensory memory lasts less than a second and allows us to process information from our senses
  • Material attended to is processed into short-term memory (7+/-2 items for 30 seconds)
  • Information rehearsed transfers to long-term memory where it can be stored indefinitely