Andrade (doodling) Flashcards
What is the title of this study?
what does doodling do?
what year was this study conducted
2009
What is the psychology being investigated
People have known to daydream frequently when presented with something boring
What is the background of this study?
prior to this study it was not know whether the act of doodling does impair attention processes by taking away resources from the primary attention task or whether it actually aids concentration towers the primary task, adiicitonally maintaining arousal
it is common in research on attention to pose the participants with dual tasks to monitor performance and then see which cognitive processes are needed to complete the tasks
What is the aim of this study?
To test whether doodling aids concentration in a boring task
What is the procedure of this study?
research method: lab experiment
Experimental design: indépendant groups
IV: doodling and control group
DV: mean correct recall, false alarms, memory scores
Sample: 40 members of the MRC applied psychology unit participant panel at the university of Plymouth (UK) aged 18-55. participants were assigned randomly to the control or doodling group
Sampling technique: opportunity sampling (they had volunteered for a different study and were the recruited)
The researcher recorded a mock telephone using a cassette recorder
a fairly monotone voice was used
average speaking rate was 227 words per minute
Played at at comfortable volume for the participant to listen to
Participants were recruited after completing an unrelated experiment and asked to stay for 5 extra minutes to help researchers
the intention was to enhance the boredom of the task by testing people who were already thinking of going home
participants were tested individually in a quiet and dull room
participants in the control condition were given a piece of lined paper and a pencil
participant in the doodling group were given a piece of paper with alternating rows of 10 squares and circles and asked to fill in the shapes
they were told “it does not have to be done neatly, it is just to relieve the boredom”
participants listened to the tapes for 2.5 minutes and wrote down the information as directed
as soon as the recording finished, the researcher took the paper and talked to the participant for a minute
the conversation included a debriefing and an apology for misleading them about the memory test, and were then asked if they suspected a memory test
half the participants then recalled names of people then places and the other half places then Andes (for counterbalancing)
What are the results of this experiment?
participants in the doodling groups shaded a mean pf 36.3 shapes, one participant did not doodle and was replaced
none of the participants in the control group doodled
3 participants in doodling and 4 in the control group suspected a memory test. none of them claimed that they actively tried to remember this information for the test
if a response indicated a plausible mishearing then it was marked as correct
new names not similar to the ones given, names of people who could not attend, or responses such as sister were socred as false alarms
15 participants in doodling and 9 in control had a perfect score
the monitoring performance (No. of correct names - the number of false alarms) was significantly higher in the doodling condition than the control group
those in the doodling group recalled 76.5 pieces correct information compared to the 5.8 of the control group
monitored names were recalled more then places
recall was significantly better for the doodling group
what are the conclusions of this study?
participant who performed a shape shading task concentrated better on a mock telephone message than those who listened with no concurrent task
it is not clear whether doodling let to better recall because doodlers happened to notice more of the target info or whether it actually aided memory recall by encouraging some deeper processing of the message
what are the ethical issues of this study?
this test was unethical
deception about the memory test
debriefing
what are the strengths and weaknesses of this study?
strengths
standardised procedure - easy to replicate for reliability
many controls - ore confident about the casual relationship
weaknesses
low generalisability - sample was from a volunteer participant panel
participan variables may have affected the findings
low mundane realism
low ecological validity
lacks any measure of daydreaming
What are the issues and debates surrounding this study?
Application
useful for student while they are revising or in class
Individual and situational explanation
this study supports both - individual participants may have used a similar strategy before, or have a personality type that requires stimulation when processing information
Situational - the process of doodling could have caused the improvement in recall
