Students' notes are often a canvas for intricate doodles and drawings, but those creative scrawlings may actually aid memory recall, according to a recent study.
Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth in England, recently conducted a study that traces the line between doodling and memory.
I wanted to study doodling as a possible way of disrupting daydreaming
Andrade said in an e-mail.
Daydreaming, which can begin in times of boredom, often continues long enough to distract the subject from the task at hand, absorbing a lot of mental resources, Andrade said.
Melissa Meyers, a first year graduate student at Ohio University studying Latin American studies, said her doodles often aid her memory recall.
It ends up helping me because I am like 'Oh that fact was right by that doodle
' so I remember what I wrote
she said.
To study doodling's effects on memory, Andrade gathered 40 participants between the ages of 18 and 55 and had them listen to a mock phone message. Half of the participants were instructed to color in shapes while listening. In the message, participants were told the names of eight people attending a party, three people not attending and eight places.
Andrade found that subjects that shaded in shapes while listening recalled 29 percent more information from the phone message than those that did not doodle.
Ronaldo Vigo, SCOPE Lab director and an assistant professor of mathematical and cognitive psychology at OU, said that the experiment's results do not really pertain to a lecture setting.
The snippet of information that was given to the subjects is not like a typical university lecture. All they were asked was to recall a list
they were not asked to learn difficult concepts as would be the case for students on campus
he said.
University lectures are often comprised of more than one type of stimulus requiring both the auditory and visual channels of the student to be engaged.
In the average lecture on campus you are going to get auditory
but you are also going to get a lot of visual cues simultaneously. I guarantee you that the doodling is not going to work here. It's going to cause all kinds of interference. You have two visual tasks and they are going to interfere
he said.
Although doodling may help with simple recall on a day-to-day basis, Vigo said he just doesn't think it will help on a college level.
Try to teach students geometry while they are doodling and see how they do. It won't work
because learning is not just recall
it's concepts
