Andrade (Doodling) Flashcards
AIM:
🔹To find out whether doodling assisted in information processing by increasing attentiveness or by enhancing memory.
BACKGROUND:
🔹Andrade defines doodling as the sketching of patterns and figures that are unrelated to the primary task.
🔹She used several strategies to increase boredom affecting the participants’ attention, therefore creating a situation in which there would be a potential for doodling to affect their attention ,for better or worse. Her expectation was that the concurrent task of doodling would interfere less with overall processing than devoting a greater amount of central executive function to daydreaming: doodling should, therefore, improve attention and thus recall should increase.
🔹In Andrade’s study, the primary task of listening to a message was an auditory task, whereas doodling is a visuo-spatial task. This ensured that the two tasks would not be in direct competition for one memory resource, as working memory model suggests that the visuo-spatial and the auditory modules can be used at the same time.
SAMPLE:
🔹40 participants who were members of the Medical Research Council unit of the cognitive research were chosen through the method of opportunity sampling.
🔹They were aged 18-55 years, mostly women, and were paid a small sum for participation. In each experimental condition, there were 20 participants.
🔹They were asked to join the study immediately after participating in an unrelated experiment for a different researcher. This was intended to enhance boredom.
PROCEDURE: 1
🔹All participants were given a piece of paper to use as a response sheet. For the control group this was a sheet of lined paper so they could have doodled if they wanted to. However, they were given no specific instructions about doodling.
🔹 Participants in the doodling group had a sheet of A4 with printed shapes and a wide margin in which to write their responses. They were asked to shade in the shapes with a pencil, without worrying about the speed and the neatness of their shading, with the task being described to them as ‘just something to relieve boredom’. All participants listened to a monotonous mock telephone call about a party.
PROCEDURE: 2
🔹During this task they were expected to either doodle (the experimental group) or not doodle (the control group). This was the independent variable. They were told beforehand they would be tested on the names of people who are attending the party. This was the monitoring task.
🔹They also had an unexpected task on the names of the places mentioned. This was the recall task.
🔹The order of these tests were counterbalanced. These two tasks were the measures of the dependent variable (DV) of recall.
🔹To operationalize the DVs, plausible mishearings, such as ‘Greg’ for ‘Craig’ were counted as correct. Other names that were on the tape but were not party-goers were scored as false alarms, as were completely new names generated by the participants. Other words relating to people, such as ‘sister’ were ignored. The final memory score for monitored information (names) and for incidental information (places) was the number of correct names/places minus false alarms.
🔹The mock telephone message lasted 2.5 minutes and was recorded in a montonous voice at a speed of 227 words per minute. It had eight names of people attending the party, and the names of three people and one cat who could not attend. Eight place names were mentioned as irrelevant details.
PROCEDURE: 3
🔹All participants listened at a comfortable volume. The experimenter apologised for misleading them about the memory test after collecting the response sheets. They then completed the surprise test of recalling names of places then people or vice versa. Finally, the participants were debriefed and asked if they suspected they would be given a memory test.
RESEARCH METHOD:
This was a laboratory experiment; the environment was not the normal place in which people would respond to telephone messages and the situation was controlled.
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN:
The design was independent measures as participants were either in the control group or in the doodling group.
RESULTS: 1
🔷 Monitoring task Results:
🔹Participants of the control group recalled a mean of 7.1 names. 5 people made a false alarm.
🔹Participants of the doodling group recalled a mean of 7.8 names. 1 person made a false alarm.
RESULTS: 2
🔹Doodling participants recalled a mean of 7.5 names and places, 29% more than the mean of the control group (5.8).
🔹Recall for both monitored and incidental information was better for doodlers than controls, even when participants who suspected a test were excluded (to eliminate effects of demand characteristics).
CONCLUSION:
🔹Andrade concluded that doodling helps concentration on a primary task. This was because the experimental participants, for whom doodling acted as a concurrent task, performed better than control participants who were just listening to the primary task with no concurrent task.
🔹However, because the doodling group were better on both the monitored and incidental information, there are two possible explanations .
- One is that the doodlers noticed more of the target words, an effect on attention. This would be explained by doodling increasing arousal and therefore reducing daydreaming, so maintaining attention on the primary task.
- The other is that doodling improved memory directly, for example by encouraging deeper information processing.
However, without a measure of daydreaming, it is difficult to distinguish between the 2 explanations. This could have been done by asking participants about daydreaming retrospectively by self-report. Alternatively, a simultaneous brain scan could have indicated whether doodling reduced activation of the cortex, which is associated with daydreaming.
EVALUATION: (strengths)
🔷 high validity -
The main method was a laboratory experiment using an independent measures design. This means that it was possible to limit uncontrolled variables, which increases validity, for example ensuring that the participants were listening at a volume comfortable to them and using a recorded telephone message so that the important words were said in the same way in each condition.
🔷 high reliability -
The study was also standardized so that the participants were all equally likely to be bored and therefore to daydream. This was achieved by the monotony of the recording, using a dull, quiet room and asking them to do the experiment when they were expecting to go home. This increases the reliability as all the participants were equally bored.
EVALUATION: (Weaknesses)
🔹Low generalizability -
The sample of the study was not as large, consisting of 40 participants, majority of them females (35) and were members of a recruitment panel and the kinds of people who volunteer for such panels may all be very similar, for example having an interest in psychology. This could bias the sample, lowering generalizability.
🔹Low Ecological validity -
The study was conducted in an artificial and highly controlled setting of a lab. Furthermore, the task of listening to a mock telephone call and having to recall information from it is not something people experience in their everyday lives, and hence, the study lacks
mundane realism
🔹Low Validity -
All the participants may have individual differences because they might have different preferred doodling styles, general concentration levels and the extent of boredom will also vary in people. There are many individual differences that will be extraneous variables. Because of this, we cannot be sure if it’s just the IV that is causing differences in the DV of both groups or the EVs that are causing them.
EVALUATION: (Ethical Issues)
The study raised some ethical issues:
🔹The participants were unable to give fully informed consent as they were given an unexpected test on place names. This had the potential to make them distressed if they were unable to remember the names, so could breach the ethical guidelines of protection from harm.
🔹Although, a debrief is not a substitute for good ethical procedures, the experimenters debriefed the participants and apologized for misleading them about the unexpected recall test.
