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Friday 12. May 2017

Note-taking is more effective for Recall Ability than Doodling

An article in the latest issue of Psychological Thought discusses the question whether doodling has a positive effect on people's ability to recall information.

The study took up on a previous one by Andrade (2010) where participants were required to do structured doodling or just listened to an audio recording. The researchers found that students who were given shapes such as squares and circles to shade in were able to recall more information afterwards.

The authors of the current study (Boggs, Cohen, Marchand) now tested two forms of doodling, namely structured and unstructured, and compared it to a note-taking and a control condition of listening only.

Their result: »We expected to find that both the unstructured and structured forms of doodling would be beneficial to recall ability, but this was not the case in our study.« And further: »We found no support that doodling improved participants' recall ability beyond just listening, although we did find a significant effect for note-taking.«

Read the article with detailed results in Psychological Psychological Thought.

Psychological Thought is published by PsychOpen, the European Open-Access Publishing Platform for Psychology operated by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID).

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