Andrade 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 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, not 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
• 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
• One possible mechanism is that doodling helps stabilize arousal at an optimal level, keeping people awake or reducing the harmful effects of mind-wandering
• Doodling has a beneficial effect on making the primary task seem particularly boring
• Participants


  • Recruited and tested immediately after they had finished a colleague's experiment
  • Told the tape would be dull, to discourage them from searching for something interesting in the material
  • Doodling task 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 doodling would improve cognitive performance
• Mechanism underlying the effect of doodling on concentration

  Doodling helps to stabilize arousal at an optimal level, keeping people awake or reducing the high levels of autonomic arousal often associated with boredom
• Hypothesis


  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
• Participants were not told about the forthcoming memory test, so they had little incentive to 'catch' themselves daydreaming and return their attention to the task
• Performance on the memory test would have benefited from deeper processing of the stimuli and greater time-on-task, i.e. less daydreaming
• How doodling may have facilitated deeper processing

  Doodling may have reduced daydreaming by adding a resource load to a rather undemanding task, or by selectively loading central executive resources needed to coordinate verbal and visuo-spatial short-term memory
• The present study lacks any measure of daydreaming, so a replication that included thought probes or retrospective self-report of daydreaming would test whether the effect of doodling on memory occurred via effects on daydreaming
• Future neuroimaging studies could test the hypothesis that doodling selectively reduces cortical activation associated with daydreaming
• The present finding that doodling aids concentration, and explaining the potential mechanism for this, has important implications for understanding the role of boredom and daydreaming, and tasks that alleviate them, in 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
• Background of study


  • People daydream frequently when presented with something boring = not paying full attention
  • People commonly doodle (draw abstract or concrete symbols, patterns, figures, etc) in ways not linked to primary task
  • Prior to study not known whether act of doodling impairs attention processes by taking away resources from primary task or whether it actually aids concentration towards primary task, additionally maintaining arousal
  • In research on attention, set participants dual tasks to monitor performance, then see which cognitive processes are needed to complete these tasks (or which processes contribute to participants failing to complete them)
• Attention


  • Our mental ability to concentrate
  • Can be about focusing on a task + trying to exclude other stimuli that could interfere with concentration
  • Can also be = being prepared for information being directed at you for example, 'paying attention' to an important message
  • We can divide our attention by attempting to focus on more than 1 message at same time
  • We can show 'selective attention' where we focus on 1 message while at same time ignoring a competing message
• Memory


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