Andrade's Doodling Study Evaluation - PDF

Andrade -- doodling Ethical issues: One weakness of Andrade's study is that the participants were deceived about the true purpose of the study. Before listening to the tape, they were told, 'The tape is rather dull but that's okay because I don't want you to remember any of it.' This was not true a...

Andrade -- doodling Ethical issues: One weakness of Andrade's study is that the participants were deceived about the true purpose of the study. Before listening to the tape, they were told, 'The tape is rather dull but that's okay because I don't want you to remember any of it.' This was not true as after the monitoring task participants were given a surprise test of recall for not only the monitored information (the party-goers' names) but also the incidental information (the place names). Although deception was important (otherwise the participants would have concentrated more while listening to the recording), it meant that participants were unable to give their fully informed consent. Methodological issues - Reliability: A strength of Andrade's study is the highly standardised procedure, which means the study can be easily replicated. All participants listened to the same audio-recorded message, meaning the pace and tone were identical; they all completed the study in the same quiet, dull room; and the interval between the monitoring and recall tasks was always one minute. This level of consistency in the procedure means the study can be easily replicated to see whether doodling really does improve concentration on a boring task. Methodological issues - Validity - Experimental method and design: A strength of the design was that the order in which the participants recalled the monitored information (names) and incidental information (places) was counterbalanced. Half the participants in each group recalled the names first then the places and the other half recalled places first and then names. This improved the validity of the findings by minimising the impact of order effects -- increased memory for incidental and monitored information could be attributed to the doodling and not the order in which they had been tested. Methodological issues - Validity - Confounding variables: Operational definitions: A weakness of this study was the operational definition of doodling. Andrade standardised the nature of the doodling by asking participants to shade 1 cm shapes, but in real life, doodling is generally a more creative and spontaneous activity. This is important because the conclusion that doodling aids concentration and recall may not be true for people who are allowed more freedom with regards to what, where and when they doodle. Methodological issues - Validity - The use of lures: A strength of Andrade's telephone message was the use of the 'lures', meaning the names of people who were not attending the party (e.g. Nigel, John and Nicky). Participants who were not really listening to the content of the message and just listening out for names might have been 'lured' into writing an incorrect answer, which would have reduced their overall monitoring performance score. This improved the validity of the findings as it ensured Andrade was really measuring participants' concentration as they had to listen carefully to what was said about each person, and not just record all the names that they heard. Methodological issues - Objectivity and subjectivity: A weakness of the study was the decision to mark misheard words as correct. For example, in the monitoring task, if a participant wrote Greg instead of Craig, this was recorded as correct, and then later in the recall task if they wrote Greg again, this was also marked as correct. This is a weakness as an assumption is being made that certain incorrect names are 'mishearings' and not false alarms, meaning the coding of answers is rather subjective. Methodological issues -- Generalisations and ecological validity -- Generalising beyond the sample: A weakness of this study is the overwhelming number of females in the study compared to males. Females made up 87.5 per cent of the sample, meaning it can be described as 'gynocentric'. This is important as it means that generalising the findings to males must be treated with caution, until the study has been replicated with a more balanced sample. Methodological issues -- Generalisations and ecological validity -- Generalising to everyday life: A weakness of this laboratory experiment is that the task was conducted in a highly controlled setting, which is unlikely to reflect the additional challenges of listening to a voicemail in a real-world setting. For example, the study took place in a quiet, under-stimulating room and the participants were asked to pretend that the speaker on the tape was a friend of theirs. Had the participants been in their own homes surrounded by other family members, pets, noisy neighbours and traffic sounds, doodling alone may not have been sufficient to help them concentrate on the message. This suggests doodling may be more effective in the laboratory and that the findings may lack ecological validity. Issues and Debates - Individual and situational explanations: A strength of this study is that it shows how attention and memory can be affected not just by participant variables (i.e. individual differences between people) but also by situational factors. Many people think of cognitive skills as fixed, measurable and relatively stable traits (e.g. 'He has a really good memory' or 'I am easily distracted'), but this study shows how other demands placed on us (e.g. not being allowed to doodle) can limit our cognitive performance. This is important and suggests that parents, teachers and employers should be aware that making small adjustments to the situation can help people to improve their performance. Issues and Debates - Applications to everyday life -- Supporting students: Leading on from the point above, a further strength of this study is that it could be used as evidence to support recommendations for teachers. Andrade's study demonstrates that a second task such as doodling can improve concentration, allowing us to remember more of what we have heard. This is an important finding as many teachers punish their students for doodling in class, but this study suggests that raising awareness of the benefits of doodling may be an important addition to teacher training. Reflections: Andrade's findings suggest that concentration and memory can be improved by allowing people to doodle while listening to a speaker, but the small sample size means that there was little analysis of individual differences within the data. It is likely that multitasking may be beneficial to some people but not to others and it is also likely that the nature of the task in this study impacted the findings. Shading shapes is very different to creating your own spontaneous image, which is likely to require more cognitive capacity and may have the opposite effect on concentration and memory. For this reason, Andrade's findings should not be overstated as doodling can take many forms and is likely to affect people in different ways.