hi class so today we're going to talk about andrade's doodling study and I know you know what doodling is it's all those little tiny pictures that you draw on the outside of your notes and on the tops of your tests and worksheets sometimes you might even get reprimanded by your teacher for this but knowing the results of the study you might be able to convince them otherwise now first let's talk about multitasking because a lot of people say they can multitask which they believe it's doing two tasks at the same time but actually only a really small small percentage of the population can do that and what we end up doing instead is dividing our attention between two things very quickly back and forth and this is why in most places being on a cell phone or on a device while we're driving is illegal now here's some vocabulary that you're going to have to know for Andres doodling study in particular a primary task is something that you're supposed to be paying attention to so if you were in class and the teacher was lecturing the primary task is listening to the lecture when we talk about the word attention this is simply concentration or mental effort that we place on a particular stimuli now it can be concentrated all in one area or it can be divided now a concurrent task is something that we can do or concentrate on at the same time that we are doing a primary task for example a primary task might be driving while a concurrent task might be listening to music now Andrade defines doodling as sketching material or items that is not related to the primary task and we all know that a majority of the time we use doodling when we are bored so Andrade used a plethora of techniques to make sure that her participants were bored before they came to the study she believed that the concurrent task of doodling would actually increase the attention on the primary task because just like listening doodling are sketches and things that don't really matter so we might be able to just do them without so much of our cognitive processing and in this case we're going to pay more attention to this really bored monotonous phone call so in this case the very boring phone call was an auditory task while the doodling was visiospatial so Andrade study was a laboratory experiment and we had independent groups so you were either part of the doodling group or the control group and it's important to know that participants were not in their natural environment and this is going to bring up a whole other set of things like ecological validity being low so the sample were 40 people that was part of a medical research group and they do get paid to be part of this group where they just volunteer for the group and then they get sent to do different studies now your book is not going to tell you this but this is an opportunity sample instead of a volunteer and the reason for this is is because Andrade didn't necessarily go in and and pre-order them to be part of her at study they didn't know that they were going to be doing this study what happened was she waited for them to come out of another study and before they were able to leave the building she said hey do you guys have time for one more study and she did this because she wanted to make sure that the participants were going to be bored or tired instead of them being fresh in it being their first study it this was part of this whole process of making sure the participants were bored so that they were more inclined to do it all it's important to know that all the participants were able to Doodle if they wanted to the control group was given a lined piece of paper and the doodling group was given an A4 sheet that had circles and squares on it and the doodling group was the only one that was instructed to shade in the circles and squares but we told him it didn't have to be knee and the timing it didn't matter about the timing of how fast they went but all participants had to listen to this monotonous phone call after or while they were given these sheets now after we handed them the sheets and before the phone call was played we told participants to pay attention to the names of the people that were attending the party and to basically forget about the names of the people that were not attending the party this was called the monitoring task because we were basically paying attention as we were listening to this recording in real time for a specific information but there was also an unexpected test and we called this the recall because we didn't exactly tell them to pay attention to it but it was information that was part of the phone call so we wanted to see if they could recall information that we didn't explicitly tell them to pay attention to when we gathered this information from our participants we used a counterbalancing technique where half the participants were asked the names of people going to the party first and then they were asked the names of places to recall while the other group was asked the names of the places first and then the names of the people going to the party so our dependent variable what we're measuring are the correct answers now we had to operationalize this just in case people heard the names a little differently for example if the name was Greg and they heard Craig we counted that as a correct answer but if someone said a name of somebody not going to the party we called that a false alarm so then we basically took our participants data by adding up the correct names plus the correct places minus the false alarms this monotonous phone call lasted two and a half minutes it had eight names of people who were attending the party three people who were not attending a party and even the name of a cat who was not attending either there were also eight place names that were inputted into this not in this phone call along with some details that didn't really matter so after the study was done and we collected the sheets that had our answers on it our researcher went to each participant and apologized for deceiving them on telling them that this was a study on memory finally at the end when we debriefed the participants we actually asked them if anyone suspected that this wasn't a study on memory because this is going to affect the main characteristics so here's some of the results there were 110 shapes on the doodling page and there was an average of 36.3 shapes that were filled in for the doodling group and no participants in the control group doodled spontaneously on their lined paper this is what I would know for the results of andrade's study the doodling group recalled a mean of 7.5 for names and places and this was 29 higher than the control group which had a mean of 5.8 remember when we asked participants if anyone suspected that this was not about a memory test well just let you know we excluded those people from the results and overall the recall of monitored or incidental information was so much higher in the doodling group over the control group and overall Andrade gets to conclude that doodling helps concentration on a primary task and she says this is because the doodling group was given a concurrent task along with the primary task well the control group was only given a primary task but because the doodling group did better on the monitored and incidental information over the control group we have two possible explanations for this not just one the doodlers could have noticed more of the target Words which is an effect on attention increasing this means that doodling could have increased arousal and limited the ability ability to daydream which helped them pay more attention to that primary task the other is that doodling could have improved memory directly and the thought behind this is that we increased memory processing somehow in a deeper way but we don't technically have the information to say that is definite and if we would have given the participants a questionnaire and asked if they daydreamed while they were performing the primary task then we would have gained more information but that was not done in the study if we would have used some type of brain scan during this study as well we could have obtained way more concrete information thank you so much for listening I'm miss m and this is a psychology if you need a classroom to belong to please join my patreon the link is down below