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1/6/2020 ANDRADE (2010) – Mia does A-Levels

Mia does A-Levels

revision notes for CIE A and AS-level biology and psychology

ANDRADE (2010)

May 26, 2018April 20, 2019 ·


AIM:
To find whether doodling would aid information processing by either increasing the efficacy of
listening or enhancing memory.

BACKGROUND:
Researchers found that when an individual’s a ention is divided, they tend to perform poorer,
however, doodling has been found to enhance concentration (Do and Schallert, 2004), perhaps due
to the reduction of daydreaming. This can be explained by the working memory model which
suggests that daydreaming is associated with high levels of arousal when concentrating on a task
and therefore the ‘central executive’ cannot spend enough cognitive processing resources on the
primary task. As reported by Wilson and Korn (2007), doodling might help maintain an optional
arousal level by either increasing or decreasing it depending on the situation.

RESEARCH METHOD:
The experiment was a laboratory one since it took place in a controlled environment and the
participants would be highly unlikely to experience a phone call in such a situation.

RESEARCH DESIGN:
The participants were distributed to either the ‘doodling’ or to the ‘control’ condition and therefore
the experiment had an independent groups design.

VARIABLES:
The independent variable was if the participants were in the ‘doodling’ or ‘control’ condition. The
dependent variable was the number of correctly recalled names.

SAMPLE:
There were 40 individuals, with ages ranging from 15 to 55, recruited using opportunity sampling
from the Medical Research Council – they were paid a small sum for participating. Each group
consisted of 20 participants, in the majority of females, with 2 males in the control and three in the
doodling one.

PROCEDURE:
Participants listened to a boring, simulated phone conversation describing a birthday party and
individuals who are going and not going there, several places were mentioned too. The phone call

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1/6/2020 ANDRADE (2010) – Mia does A-Levels

lasted 2.5 minutes and included 8 names of the party-goers and 3 of the non-party-goers as well as
8 place names. Individuals in the ‘doodling’ group were provided an A4 paper with outlined
shapes and encouraged to doodle while listening to the conversation, those in the ‘control’ group
were not. They were told they will be tested on recalling the names of the individuals who will go
to the party, which was the ‘monitoring’ task. Additionally, there was a ‘recall’ task in which they
were asked to remember the names of the places mentioned. Counterbalancing was used (the order
of the ‘monitoring’ and ‘recall’ task was randomized) in order to reduce order effects. The
dependent variable was operationalized by accepting the names misspelled due to the participants
hearing it wrong and considering the names of the individuals who weren’t going to the party as
false alarms. The final score was calculated by subtracting the false alarms from the number of
correct names provided. The experimenter debriefed the participants about the memory test and
apologized for deceiving them.

RESULTS:
Participants in the doodling condition doodled 36 shapes on average, those in the control condition
did not. Participants in the ‘control’ condition provided correctly a mean of 7.1 out of 8 names with
five of them making false alarms while participants in the ‘doodling’ condition recalled a mean of
7.8 party-goer names and only one false alarm was made.
The ‘doodling’ group provided 29% more correct information about the names of individuals and
places than the ‘control’ one, their recall for monitored and incidental information was significantly
higher.

CONCLUSIONS:
Doodling was concluded to aid concentration since those who did doodle recalled more
information than those who did not. As those in the ‘doodling’ condition performed be er on both
the monitored and incidental tasks, it can be assumed that they either noticed more words because
their a ention was enhanced, or their memory was improved since doodling might have supported
a deeper information processing. It is difficult to assess which of these suggestions is more realistic
due to there not being information collected on the levels of daydreaming of individuals – a self-
report or cortex activity brain scan could have been taken.

WORDPRESS.COM.

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