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

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Memory Studies

Background:

• Doodling is a common behavior during learning.
• Its effect on memory performance is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how doodling affects memory recall.
• To differentiate between free-form and structured doodling impacts.

Main Methods:

• Participants engaged in doodling, drawing, or writing while listening to word lists or stories.
• Memory recall was assessed after encoding.

Main Results:

• Free-form doodling led to poorer recall than drawing or writing.
• Drawing task-relevant information enhanced memory recall.
• Structured doodling showed no memory benefit compared to writing.

Conclusions:

• Free-form doodling incurs memory costs.
• Task-relevant drawing enhances memory, unlike doodling.
• Structured doodling provides no memory advantage.