Comparing the influence of doodling, drawing, and writing at encoding on memory.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the extent to which doodling, which we define as drawing that is semantically unrelated to to-be-remembered information, enhances memory performance. In Experiment 1, participants heard auditorily presented lists of categorized words. They were asked to either doodle, draw a picture of, or write out, each item while listening to the target words. Participants showed poorer free recall for words encoded while free-form doodling compared to words that were drawn or written, with drawing resulting in the best performance. In Experiment 2, target words were embedded in a narrative story to better resemble a real-world situation in which one might doodle. Participants monitored each auditorily presented narrative while either free-form doodling, drawing, or writing in response to the target words. As in Experiment 1, doodling led to the poorest subsequent recall for targets compared to drawing or writing during encoding. In Experiment 3, we used a structured doodling task at encoding, such that participants shaded in geometric shapes printed on paper rather than create their own doodles. Structured doodling led to similar levels of recall compared to simply writing. Creating a drawing of the words at encoding, rather than doodling, once again enhanced recall significantly. Taken together, these findings indicate that unlike task-relevant drawing, structured doodling during study provides no benefits to free recall, and free-form doodling leads to memory costs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).