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: The Official Journal of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 24(1), 100-106.

Psychology Being Investigated

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

Doodling

Doodling is the act of drawing pictures or patterns while thinking about something else or when bored.

It is a form of aimless sketching. Doodling is typically spontaneous and automatic.

It is often done absent-mindedly, without much conscious effort.

Daydreaming

Daydreaming means being lost in thought, detached from what is actually happening around you.

It pulls attention away from the task at hand.

Someone daydreaming during a lecture, for example, is usually not taking in what is being said.

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 a state of being awake and reactive to stimuli. It reflects a person’s overall level of alertness.

Andrade’s study asks whether doodling raises arousal back toward an optimal level, and so improves focus.

In a boring task, that means doodling nudges low arousal back up, keeping the doodler alert rather than drowsy.

Background

Daydreaming has been linked to moments of boredom in people, and that in such situations, people may resort to doodling to help concentration.

It has also been assumed that doing concurrent tasks, such as doodling, impairs concentration or distracts from a primary task.

However, the effects of boredom on processing have been overlooked.

The researchers also considered the role of arousal, noting that arousal levels need to be maintained to be able to concentrate.

The study also took into account the fact that information processing can be difficult when asked to do multiple things at once.

The researchers used a dual-task design to pinpoint cognitive resources.

Aims

• 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 conducted a well-controlled laboratory experiment to investigate how doodling affects memory and attention.

Participants were randomly allocated to either the doodling group or the control group, in what is known as an independent measures design.

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: Participants were given an A4 sheet of paper with alternating rows of 10 squares and circles, each about 1 cm in diameter. They were instructed to shade in the shapes while listening to the message and were told this was to relieve boredom, with no emphasis on neatness or speed. They were also given a 4.5 cm margin on the left side of the paper to write down the names.
• Control Group: Participants were given a standard A4 sheet of lined paper and a pencil. They were not given any doodling instructions.

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.

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

Participants in the control group did not doodle.

Monitoring Task

The doodling group demonstrated significantly better monitoring performance compared to the control group.

• The doodling group correctly wrote down a mean of 7.8 names of party-goers, with one false alarm, leading to a monitoring score of 7.71.
• The control group correctly wrote down a mean of 7.1 names, with five false alarms, resulting in a monitoring score of 6.91.
• This difference was statistically significant, indicating that doodling helped participants concentrate better on the primary task of monitoring the telephone message.

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.

False Alarms

The control group had more false alarms during the monitoring task (five in total) compared to the doodling group (one in total). This suggests that doodling helped reduce daydreaming, or mind-wandering.

Conclusion

• People concentrate better and their memory is better when allowed to doodle as it focuses their attention and stops them from getting distracted.
• The study notes two possible explanations for why doodling improves recall: that either doodling affects attention, or it improves memory by encouraging deeper information processing.
• However, without measuring daydreaming, it was difficult to distinguish between the two explanations.

Strengths

1. Counterbalancing

Counterbalancing was used to control for order effects with regards to the dependent variable.

Half the participants recalled names first and then places, while the other half recalled places first and then names.

This ensured that the order of the memory recall task did not affect the results

2. Control for Demand Characteristics

The study used deception: participants were not told there would be a memory test.

This stopped them memorising on purpose.

Researchers also asked participants afterward whether they had suspected a memory test.

Even after removing data from suspicious participants, the results stayed significant, showing demand characteristics did not drive the effect.

3. Use of Quantitative Data

The study primarily collected quantitative data, such as the number of shapes shaded by the doodling group and the number of names and places recalled.

This numerical data allows for easy comparison between the experimental and control conditions.

The use of means, standard deviations and statistical tests all contributed to a robust analysis of the data.

4. A Genuinely Bored, Fatigued Sample

The study was designed to create a boring condition, which could cause daydreaming.

The researchers recruited participants after they had completed another study to make it more likely they would be bored

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

Individual differences in how much people doodle could affect the results.

Shading ranged hugely, from 3 to 110 shapes.

Because the study never measured or controlled this variation, it could be a hidden confound.

Some participants may also simply have had better memories than others, which would skew the results.

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 were benign, carrying no real psychological or physical risk to participants.

The surprise memory test was different. It may have caused some psychological distress: participants who did not expect to be tested might have felt anxious or judged on their memory performance.

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 apologized for misleading participants about the surprise memory test.

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

Issues and Debates

Application: Improved Learning and Engagement

The study’s findings suggest that doodling can be integrated into learning strategies to keep students engaged during passive learning activities, such as listening to lectures or watching educational videos.

Educators might encourage doodling as a way to maintain focus, particularly for students who struggle with attention.

Application: Reducing Negative Thinking

Doodling may also reduce negative thinking, by occupying the mental resources that would otherwise be spent in negative thoughts.

Application: ADHD Management

Doodling may be a practical, non-pharmacological strategy to help manage symptoms of ADHD, as it could provide enough stimulus to prevent distractions and improve focus on a primary task.

Links to the Cognitive Approach

• The cognitive approach studies how we process information, including how memory works.
• The study explored information processing as input, processing, and output.
• It tested whether doodling affects memory recall.
• Participants processed the telephone message even while not directly focusing on it.
• Doodlers recalled more names, suggesting they could selectively attend to the message.
• The study also examined the role of split attention in recall.
• Individual differences between people can reflect different patterns of cognition.
• The doodling group’s better monitoring performance suggests they were processing two tasks, or dual processing, more effectively than the control group.
• Doodling may allow more optimal cognitive processing by reducing daydreaming.

Individual and situational explanations

The study shows how an individual’s action (doodling) can change the outcome of a situation (a boring task).

Individual differences

The study may support the individual side of the debate because everyone doodled in different ways, perhaps based on their personality type.

There was a wide variety in the amount of doodles (e.g., someone doodled 100 items).

People who are labelled as extraverts may require to do more than one thing at once to help stimulate themselves and concentrate better.

Different personalities will doodle in different ways.

Situational explanations

The study may support the situational side of the debate because Andrade made sure everyone was bored so the situation caused them to doodle and concentrate more when doodling.

The task itself may have brought about an improvement in concentration as doodling helped them focus more and the doodling group recalled more correct names than the control.

The situation of a boring or monotonous telephone message made the participants doodle, and some of these participants may be used to doodling in boring situations.

Reductionism versus holism

Reductionism

The Andrade study largely adopts a reductionist approach through its controlled lab experiment, standardized procedures, operational definitions, and quantitative analysis.

These elements allow for isolating the impact of doodling on specific variables.

Holism

The study recognizes that multiple factors interact with each othe

The study considers the interplay of various cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, and daydreaming, rather than treating them as completely separate entities.

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

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