Andrade (doodling)

Andrade’s (2010) doodling study tested whether doodling while listening to something boring helps or harms memory. Participants who shaded in shapes during a dull phone message later recalled about 29% more information than those who just listened.

The result suggests a light, undemanding task protects attention from daydreaming rather than distracting from it.

Andrade, J. (2010). What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24(1), 100–106. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1561

Psychology Being Investigated

The psychology investigated in the Andrade study focuses on two cognitive processes, attention and memory, and how doodling affects them.

Doodling and Daydreaming

Doodling is aimless sketching: drawing shapes or patterns while thinking about something else, or when bored. It is spontaneous, semi-automatic, and takes almost no conscious effort.

Daydreaming is different. It means being lost in thought, detached from what is happening around you. A lecture drifts past unheard.

The two look similar but cost very different amounts of mental effort. Daydreaming produces vivid, self-generated thoughts that draw on the same limited working memory you need to take in what you are hearing (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006).

That is the heart of Andrade’s argument. Daydreaming, not doodling, is the real thief of attention.

During a dull task, listening uses only a fraction of your capacity. An idle mind fills the surplus with daydreams. A light doodling task fills it instead, and costs far less.

Working memory

The working memory model proposes separate components for processing visual and auditory information.

These components allow the brain to temporarily hold and manipulate information from these different senses which suggests separate visual and auditory memory systems.

The study uses an auditory task (listening to a phone message) and a visual task (doodling) to investigate how these systems interact.

Andrade’s effect maps onto two working-memory components. Shading shapes is a light visuospatial-motor activity: it occupies just enough of the visuospatial sketchpad, the working-memory store for visual images, to block vivid mental imagery.

That leaves the phonological loop, the system that holds spoken sounds, free to process the party message. This selective interference is why doodling can protect listening, while a demanding drawing task or daydreaming itself would not.

Dual-task design

A dual-task design asks participants to do two things at once, to see how one task affects the other.

Psychologists use this design to study divided attention: how mental effort splits between simultaneous tasks. The main one is the primary task; the other is the secondary, or concurrent task.

Andrade used exactly this design.

The primary task was monitoring a telephone message; the concurrent task was doodling.

Arousal

Arousal is how awake and reactive to stimuli you are. It is your overall level of alertness.

A boring, under-stimulating task lets arousal fall below the level good performance needs. On this reading, the small motor act of shading nudges alertness back toward its optimum, keeping the doodler awake rather than drowsy.

That prediction is almost identical to Andrade’s. The difference is the route: physiological alertness rather than crowding out daydreams.

As Andrade herself argued, the attention account fits the data better, particularly the improved recall of incidental place names. But her design measured neither daydreaming nor arousal, so it cannot separate the two explanations.

Background

People doodle most when they are bored. Dull lectures, long meetings, tedious phone calls: the margins fill up.

Conventional wisdom reads that as disengagement. A teacher who sees a pupil shading the margins assumes they have stopped listening. Mainstream dual-task theory agrees: any concurrent activity should draw on limited capacity and impair the main task.

Andrade inverted the assumption. If doodling reliably turns up alongside boredom, perhaps it is the mind’s own way of coping with under-stimulation.

On that view it should protect performance, not degrade it. Arousal mattered here too: concentration needs a certain level of alertness, and boredom’s effect on processing had largely been overlooked.

Two predictions, then, pointing in opposite directions. Andrade’s experiment was built to settle them in a single controlled comparison, using a dual-task design to see which cognitive resources doodling actually draws on.

Aims

Andrade set out to test three things.

• To investigate whether doodling aids concentration or memory.
• To investigate if doodling affects the recall of places and names.
• To test the effects of doodling on a boring or mundane task.

Method

Sample

The sample was 40 participants aged 18 to 55, recruited from a Medical Research Council participant panel at the Applied Psychology Unit.

The study had a gender imbalance, with a higher number of female (35) participants than male (5).

In each experimental condition, there were 20 participants.

• 18 females and 2 males were in the control group.
• 17 females and 3 males were in the doodling (experimental) group.

The participants were a volunteer sample and were recruited after completing another, unrelated study at the same research facility.

One participant in the doodling group was replaced because they did not doodle.

Design

Andrade ran a well-controlled laboratory experiment on doodling, memory and attention. Does a doodle help concentration, or distract from it?

Participants were randomly allocated to either the doodling group or the control group. This is an independent measures design, meaning each person takes part in only one condition.

The study also used a dual-task design, with a primary task of monitoring a phone call while participants simultaneously doodled or did not doodle.

This design isolated doodling’s effect on memory and attention.

Independent variable

The independent variable was doodling. Participants in the doodling condition shaded in shapes; those in the control condition did not doodle.

The IV was manipulated through materials: the doodling group received paper with shapes to shade; the control group received lined paper.

Doodling was operationally defined as shading in printed shapes on a response sheet. This kept the task light and easy to measure.

Dependent variable

The dependent variable was the participants’ memory and attention performance, measured through a monitoring task and a surprise recall test.

This was measured quantitatively by calculating the number of correct names and places recalled, minus any false alarms.

Procedure

Participants were recruited just after they had completed another study, to ensure they would be more inclined to be bored.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions:

• Doodling group: an A4 sheet printed with alternating rows of 10 squares and circles, each about 1 cm across, to be shaded in while listening.
• Control group: a standard A4 sheet of lined paper and a pencil, with no doodling instructions at all.

The doodlers were told the shading was just to relieve boredom. Neatness and speed did not matter.

A 4.5 cm margin ran down the left of their sheet. That is where they wrote the names.

Monitoring Task

Participants listened to a pre-recorded, monotonous telephone message for 2.5 minutes.

It named eight people coming to a party, three people and a cat not coming, and eight incidental place names.

The tape ran at 227 words a minute.

While listening, participants had to write down the names of people attending the party.

The control group used lined paper; the doodling group wrote the names in the margin of their shape-shading sheet.

Surprise Recall Task

After the telephone message ended, participants faced a surprise memory test they had not been told about.

First came a minute of small talk with the experimenter.

Then they were asked to recall the names of party-goers, or the places, depending on their group.

The order was counterbalanced to rule out order effects: half of each group recalled names first, then places; the other half did places first, then names.

Finally, participants were debriefed and asked whether they had suspected a memory test.

Data Collection and Analysis

The number of shapes shaded by participants in the doodling group was counted.

This was done to ensure that they had followed the instructions to doodle and to measure the extent of their doodling.

The range of the amount of doodling was recorded.

The number of correct names noted down, minus any false alarms (names of people not attending), was used to assess monitoring performance and the recall task.

Plausible mishearings of names (e.g. “Greg” instead of “Craig”) were counted as correct, provided that the same plausible mishearing was used consistently in the monitoring and recall phases.

Data from participants who suspected a memory test were removed from the analysis to check for demand characteristics.

Results

Doodling Activity

Participants in the doodling group shaded an average of 36.3 shapes on their response sheets, with a range from 3 to 110. Participants in the control group did not doodle.

These counts matter for the interpretation. They confirm the doodling group actually followed the instruction, so the comparison is between doodling and not doodling.

They also show the secondary task stayed light. Shading a few dozen small shapes over 2.5 minutes takes little conscious effort, and nobody shaded so heavily that it plausibly competed with listening.

Monitoring Task

The doodling group monitored the message significantly better than the control group.

• Doodling group: a mean of 7.8 correct names, with one false alarm across the group, giving a monitoring score of 7.71.
• Control group: a mean of 7.1 correct names, with five false alarms, giving a monitoring score of 6.91.
• Significance: the difference was statistically significant, so doodling did not impair the primary task and, if anything, sharpened it.

The false alarms are the revealing detail. A false alarm means writing down a name that was never in the message, and the control group made five to the doodlers’ one.

Non-doodlers, in other words, were drifting off and mis-monitoring. That is the closest the study comes to catching daydreaming in the act.

Recall Task

Doodling improved recall too.

When recalling names, the doodling group had a mean score of 5.1, compared with 4.03 for the control group.

For places, the doodling group scored 2.4 against 1.83 for the control group.

Combined, the doodling group recalled a mean of 7.5 pieces of information, 29% more than the control group’s mean of 5.81.

Names were recalled better than places in both groups. That is no surprise: the names were the ones participants had been told to write down.

The places are the more telling result. Nobody was told to remember them, and nobody knew a memory test was coming, so a deliberate strategy cannot explain the doodlers’ advantage there.

That points to a general steadying of attention rather than a memory trick. Doodling did not teach anyone how to remember. It kept them present, so more of everything got in.

Conclusion

Andrade drew three conclusions from the results.

• Doodling helps: people concentrated better and remembered more when allowed to doodle, so a light side task does not steal attention from a boring one.
• Two explanations: doodling may protect attention by reducing daydreaming, or it may improve memory by encouraging deeper processing of what was heard.
• Unresolved: because daydreaming was never measured, the study cannot say which of the two explanations is right.

Strengths

1. Experimental Control and Internal Validity

The recall test was a genuine surprise. Participants were told only that they were monitoring a phone message, so nobody could rehearse the names or adopt a memory strategy in advance.

Andrade also checked. Every participant was asked afterwards whether they had suspected a memory test, and the data from those who had were removed.

The doodling advantage survived that removal. That makes it unlikely the result is an artefact of demand characteristics, the cues that lead participants to guess a study’s purpose and behave accordingly.

Three further controls back that up. The order of the names and places tests was counterbalanced, so no recall advantage can be blamed on which test came first.

Scores were corrected for false alarms. A participant who confidently "recalled" a name that was never in the message lost credit for it. The two groups were therefore compared on accurate memory, not sheer output.

Standardisation did the rest. The procedure was identical for everyone: same tape, same instructions, same 2.5 minutes. Taken together, these controls let the difference in recall be attributed to doodling with reasonable confidence.

2. A Genuinely Bored Sample and Quantitative Measures

Boredom is hard to create in a laboratory. Ask people to sit through something dull and they usually know they are in an experiment about being bored.

Andrade sidestepped that. She recruited people who had just finished taking part in a different, unrelated study, so they arrived already tired and unmotivated.

The low-arousal state the theory is about was therefore real rather than staged. That arguably raises the ecological validity of the boredom itself, even though the doodling task remains artificial.

The measures were just as deliberate. Every outcome in the study is a number: names monitored, items recalled, false alarms, shapes shaded.

Numbers make the comparison direct. Means, standard deviations and statistical tests can be applied to the two conditions. The 29% recall advantage is a figure, not an impression.

They also make the study easy to describe, to teach, and to attempt to replicate. That last point matters: a finding stated in numbers can be checked by someone else.

Weaknesses

1. Limited Ecological Validity

The study was conducted in a controlled laboratory setting. But the tasks themselves were artificial: listening to a monotonous phone message and shading pre-printed shapes is not how doodling normally happens.

This limits generalising to everyday classrooms or workplaces.

Real-world doodling is rarely just auditory or visual: people usually draw shapes and figures, not shade pre-printed ones.

Monitoring a phone message is also not a typical everyday task.

2. Sample Bias and Limited Generalizability

The participants were recruited from a medical research panel. This panel may share specific interests or motivations, so the sample was not very diverse.

It was not representative of the wider population.

Only 5 of the 40 participants were male, so the findings about concentration and memory may apply mainly to women.

The age range of 18 to 55, though broad, might not cover all age groups, further limiting generalisability.

A sample of just 40 people also makes it hard to generalise the findings more widely.

3. Lack of Measurement of Daydreaming

The study never directly measured whether daydreaming occurred.

This makes Andrade’s explanation an inference, not a demonstration. The improvement could equally reflect reduced daydreaming, deeper processing, or a rise in arousal.

A boring task can drop arousal too low for good performance, and doodling’s light physical activity may simply nudge alertness back toward an optimal level.

Self-report measures of daydreaming, or a physiological measure of arousal, would have let the study test these rival explanations directly.

4. Participant Variables and Uncontrolled Doodling

How much people doodled was measured but never manipulated. Shading ranged from 3 shapes to 110, and every doodler was scored the same way regardless.

So the study cannot answer the obvious follow-up question. How much doodling is best?

Nor can it say where the benefit reverses. If shading is helpful because it is light, a more demanding doodle should at some point start competing with listening instead of protecting it.

Other individual differences went uncontrolled too. Some people picture things more vividly than others, some mind-wander more by disposition, and some simply have better memories. Any of those could skew a 40-person comparison.

Contemporary Research

Research since 2015 has tested Andrade’s claim more rigorously, and separated it from a related but different effect: drawing to remember. The picture that emerges is more nuanced than the original study suggested.

Doodling Does Not Replicate Under Stronger Controls

The strongest direct test of Andrade’s claim comes from Spencer-Mueller and Fenske (2024), published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Aim: To retest, with far more statistical power and better controls, whether doodling reduces boredom and mind-wandering and improves memory for spoken material.

Method: Across two experiments (222 participants total), people listened to a boring lecture, then to spoken material while doodling, note-taking, or just listening. Thought-probes measured boredom, mind-wandering, and attention throughout.

Results: Doodling reduced neither boredom nor mind-wandering. Nor did it improve attention or memory. Note-taking produced the best attention, the best test scores, and the least boredom.

Conclusion: The memory benefit Andrade reported does not reliably reproduce under tighter controls, and an active, content-relevant task beats a content-irrelevant one. Because this study is larger, measures the proposed mechanism directly, and appeared in a strong peer-reviewed journal, it carries more weight than the original 2010 finding.

The Drawing Effect: A Different, Better-Supported Finding

A separate, more robust line of research shows that drawing the material you are trying to remember, rather than doodling something unrelated, produces large memory gains.

Wammes, Meade, and Fernandes (2016) ran seven free-recall experiments. Drawing words at encoding roughly doubled later recall compared with writing them.

They linked the benefit to a genuine encoding effect: drawing integrates semantic, visual, and motor information about the word, producing deeper, more integrated processing than simply writing the word down.

This is a different mechanism from Andrade’s. The drawing effect is about how deeply you process the material itself; doodling is about keeping attention on someone else’s words by occupying spare capacity. Popular coverage often conflates the two, overstating the evidence for doodling specifically.

Fidget Interventions: Weak Evidence for a Popular Extension

Andrade’s finding is often generalised into a case for classroom fidget toys and movement breaks.

The broadest test of this idea is a meta-analysis by Schoenen et al. (2025) in School Psychology Review.

It looked well beyond one classroom. Rather than relying on a single trial, it pooled many single-case studies of fidget devices used as academic and behavioural interventions, looking for a consistent pattern across all of them.

The verdict from this larger, more systematic body of evidence: limited and inconsistent support for any consistent academic or behavioural benefit.

Meta-analyses carry real weight. A synthesis of many studies is a far stronger basis for classroom policy than one boring-task experiment, and it cautions against extending Andrade’s tidy laboratory result into a blanket recommendation.

Ethics

Deception

Participants were not fully informed about the true purpose of the study.

They were told they were participating in a study about monitoring a phone message, but were not informed that there would be a surprise memory test at the end.

This withholding of information is a form of deception, as the participants were not aware of all aspects of the study.

Justification for deception

The deception was considered necessary for the validity of the study.

The researchers had to deceive participants to prevent them from deliberately trying to memorize information, which would have affected the results.

The researchers did try to maintain ethical standards by debriefing and explaining the deception, and also by apologizing for misleading them.

Informed Consent

Participants did not give fully informed consent.

Because of the deception, they were not told everything about the study, including the surprise memory test, before agreeing to take part.

This lack of full disclosure violates the ethical principle of informed consent. That principle requires participants to be aware of the study’s nature, purpose, procedures, and any potential risks or benefits, before taking part.

Psychological Distress

The doodling and monitoring tasks carried no real psychological or physical risk. The tape was boring, not distressing.

The surprise memory test was different. Participants who had not expected to be tested may have felt anxious, or judged on how good their memory was.

That discomfort was mild and short-lived, and the debriefing that followed explained the deception and restored consent after the fact.

On balance, the ethical cost of this study was small and proportionate to what the deception bought: a memory test nobody could prepare for.

Debriefing

To address the ethical concerns about deception, researchers debriefed participants at the end of the study.

They explained the study’s true aim and the deception. Researchers also apologised for misleading participants about the surprise memory test.

Debriefing like this is a standard safeguard against the ethical costs of deception.

Issues and Debates

Real-World Applications

If a cheap, unobtrusive activity can protect attention during monotony, the practical uses are broad. Three have been suggested.

• Learning: allowing light doodling in lectures or long videos may help some listeners stay engaged, especially when the material is dull.
• Intrusive thoughts: doodling occupies the visual resources that feed vivid worries, so simple drawing tasks have been explored for dampening unwanted mental images.
• ADHD: doodling is sometimes offered as a non-drug way to manage the symptoms of ADHD, giving restless attention somewhere to go.

All three share one boundary condition. It is easy to miss. The secondary task has to stay light, and unrelated to the material.

The moment a doodle becomes effortful or figurative, it stops filling spare capacity and starts competing for it. A detailed scene, or a picture of what is being described, is no longer a doodle in Andrade’s sense. The benefit reverses into interference.

These applications should also be held loosely. The replication record is mixed, and the meta-analysis of fidget devices discussed above found limited and inconsistent support for the classroom version of this idea.

Links to the Cognitive Approach

This is a cognitive study through and through.

• Information processing: the cognitive approach treats the mind as input, processing and output, which is exactly how the listening task was framed.
• Memory: the study tested whether a concurrent task changes how much of that input is later recalled.
• Selective attention: doodlers recorded more names, so they were filtering the message more effectively than controls.
• Divided attention: the doodling group handled two tasks at once better than the control group handled one.
• Individual differences: how much people doodled varied widely, and the approach expects such differences in how people process information.

Individual and Situational Explanations

This debate asks whether behaviour comes from something about the person or from the situation they are in. Andrade’s study can be read either way.

The individual reading points to how differently people doodled. Shading ranged from 3 shapes to 110, which hints at stable differences in how people handle boredom.

An extravert, for instance, may need more than one thing going on to stay stimulated and concentrate. Personality shapes how, and how much, someone doodles.

The situational reading points at the tape. Andrade engineered the study so that everyone was bored, and it was that boredom which made doodling worth doing at all.

The doodling group then recalled more than the control group. On this reading the task, not the person, produced the improvement in concentration.

The honest answer is both. An individual’s action changed the outcome of a situation that had been built to induce daydreaming.

Reductionism versus Holism

The study is mostly reductionist. It takes something as messy as concentration and boils it down to two numbers: names recalled, and shapes shaded.

The controlled laboratory setting, the standardised tape and the operational definition of doodling all serve that aim. Each strips away variables so the effect of one factor can be isolated.

There is a holistic side as well. Andrade’s explanation treats attention, memory and daydreaming as one interacting system rather than three separate boxes.

Doodling only helps because all three draw on the same limited pool of mental capacity. Take that interaction away and the finding makes no sense at all.

References

Andrade, J. (2010). What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24(1), 100–106. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1561

Schoenen, E. C., Alsip, B. S., Martinez, J. C., Grekov, P., Aspiranti, K. B., & Hulac, D. M. (2025). A meta-analysis of fidget devices as academic and behavioral interventions. School Psychology Review, 54(3), 315–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/2372966X.2024.2411576

Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 946–958. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.946

Spencer-Mueller, E. K., & Fenske, M. J. (2024). Note-taking for the win: Doodling does not reduce boredom or mind-wandering, nor enhance attention or retention of lecture material. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(8), 1780–1796. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231222402

Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2016). The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9), 1752–1776. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494

Keep Learning

To help reinforce your understanding and prepare for potential exam questions, here are some practice questions related to this study for AICE Psychology:

Sampling and Methodology

• Identify two features of the sample used in the Andrade study.
• Identify one strength of the sample used in the Andrade study.
• State how the participants were allocated to conditions in this study.
• Describe the materials that were used in both the ‘doodling’ condition and the ‘control’ condition in the study by Andrade.
• Outline the procedure used in the Andrade study for a participant who was in the doodling condition.
• Describe the procedure of the study by Andrade, from the point when the tape had finished playing.
• Outline how ‘monitoring performance’ was scored in the Andrade study.

Aims and Background

• State the aim of the Andrade study.
• Outline one aim of the Andrade study.
• Describe the background to the Andrade study.

Results and Conclusions

• Outline one result from the monitoring performance scores.
• Outline one finding from the Andrade study.
• Outline one conclusion from the Andrade study.

Applications

• Suggest one real-world application of the Andrade study.
• Explain one real-world application based on the finding from the Andrade study.
• Describe how the results of the study by Andrade (doodling) could be applied to help workers doing repetitive jobs who find it hard to concentrate.
• Suggest one real-world application based on the results of the Andrade study.

Links to Approaches and Debates

• Explain why the Andrade study is from the cognitive approach.
• Outline what is meant by the cognitive approach in psychology and include examples from the Andrade study.
• Describe the psychology being investigated in the Andrade study.
• Outline the debate about individual and situational explanations in psychology.
• Explain why the Andrade study supports either the individual or situational side of the debate.
• Explain one reason why Xander is correct and one reason why Silvia is correct about individual and situational explanations for the Andrade study.
• Explain how one finding from the study by Andrade supports one of the assumptions of the cognitive approach.

Evaluations

• Evaluate the study by Andrade in terms of two strengths and two weaknesses. At least one of your evaluation points must be about the use of quantitative data.
• Evaluate the study by Andrade in terms of two strengths and two weaknesses. At least one of your evaluation points must be about generalisations.
• Explain one strength of the Andrade study.
• Identify one strength of this study in relation to the experimental design used.
• Explain one similarity and one difference between the Andrade study and one other core study from the cognitive approach.

Other

• Describe the materials that were used in both the ‘doodling’ condition and the ‘control’ condition in the study by Andrade.

Study Summary Sheet

Original Journal Article