Abstract

Day dreaming and mind wandering are common phenomena that use mental energy and can be distracting. A common strategy employed against day dreaming is doodling (simple unfocused drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied). Jackie Andrade (2009) reported that, doodling help people manage distractions which in turn leads to improved performance on memory tasks. The present study tries to evaluate the hypothesis whether the benefits of doodling vary across retrieval strategies (recall vs recognition). In the present experiment two groups (retrieval strategy: recall vs recognition) of participants (32 = 16 + 16) with mean age 19.8 ± 2 yrs were involved in a doodling task while a boring story was played in the background. This was followed retrieval tests of information embedded in the audio story. One way analysis of variance (dependent: memory accuracy, independent: recall vs recognition) reported main effects of retrieval strategy (F 1, 30 = 3.428, p = 0.07, Mean recognition = 4.625 ± 2.5, Mean recall = 3.125 ± 1.4). Pearson correlation between doodling percentage and memory accuracy reported r = −0.05, p = 0.77). The results Doodling benefits memory retrieval using recognition over recall. However this benefit is independent of amount of doodling.

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