3.2 Core study 1: Andrade (doodling)

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Attention

Attention is your brain function that allocates cognitive processing resources to focus on information or stimuli.

Types of attention

We can talk about four different types of attention:

1.

Sustained attention

2.

Selective attention

Alternating attention

3.

Divided attention

4.

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Sustained Attention

• Sustained attention is the ability to keep that focus or concentration for long periods of time even if the individual is exposed to the repetitive action or activity.

• This is the kind of attention that is usually used for majority of the learning and working activities.

• Examples:

• listening to a teacher lecture the whole hour, read books and notes the whole night to review, in answering test or exercise questions, completing an extensive projec

Selective Attention

• Selective attention is the ability to select from the many factors or stimuli and focus to only one that you prefer or your brain selects.

• Every day, people are usually exposed to a number of environmental factors at home, at the school, at the office, etc but their brains respond by focusing only to the particular factors that matter most or those that people choose to focus on.

Alternating Attention

• It’s the ability to switch or immediately transfer your focus or concentration from one activity to another.

• The brain also instantly adapts even if the succeeding activity has a different level of knowledge or comprehension required.

• Similar to selective attention, alternating attention is also an ability that is used almost all the time.

Divided attention

Remember our example from the beginning.

• Divided attention is the ability of an individual to focus or concentrate on two or more environmental factors, stimuli, or activities simultaneously.

• How to influence your divided attention?

Doodling!

Boredom

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• Boredom is a very common experience (Harris, 2000) and daydreaming is a common response, even in the laboratory (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006).

• Daydreaming is linked to high arousal when we are bored and it uses important cognitive resources.

• It inhibits performance on the tasks that use particular resourse from the working memory.

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Working memory model

Alan Baddeley, 1974

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Sample

Participants were 40 members of the MRC Applied Psychology Unit participant panel, recruited from the general population and aged between 18 and 55 years

They were paid a small honorarium for taking part. Participants

were randomly assigned to the control (N= 20; 2 male) or doodling group (N= 20; 3 male).

All participants monitored a telephone message and then attempted to recall monitored and incidental information. Recall order was counterbalanced across participants.

Materials

A mock telephone message was recorded onto audio cassette tape in a fairly monotone voice at an average speaking rate of 227 words per minute, and played at a comfortable listening volume.

• The script included eight names of people attending a party, and names of three people and one cat who could not attend.
• Eight place names were mentioned, along with much irrelevant material.

Participants in the doodling condition used a pencil to shade shapes of approximately 1 cm diameter printed on a piece of A4 paper, with 10 shapes per row and alternating rows of squares and circles.

Procdecure

All participants listened to a dull telephone call:

• During this task, they doodled (experimental group) or they did not doodle (control group) and this was independent variable.
• They were told they would be tested on the names of people who were attending the party - MONITORING TASK.
• They also had unexpected test on the names of places - RECALL TASK.

The order of these tasks was counterbalanced and they were measures of dependent variables.

The final score for monitoring was the number of correct names minus false alarms.

Instructions

‘‘I am going to play you a tape. I want you to pretend that the speaker is a friend who has telephoned you to invite you to a party. The tape is rather dull but that’s okay because I don’t want you to remember any of it. Just write down the names of people who will definitely or probably be coming to the party (excluding yourself). Ignore the names of those who can’t come. Do not write anything else.’’

• Participants in the doodling condition were also asked to shade in the squares and circles while listening to the tape.

• They were told ‘It doesn’t matter how neatly or how quickly you do this—it is just something to help relieve the boredom’.

Participants listened to the tape, which lasted 2.5 minutes, and wrote down the names as instructed.

When the tape finished, the experimenter collected the response sheets, and

engaged participants in conversation for 1 minute including an apology for misleading them about the memory test.

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• Participants in the doodling group shaded a mean of 36.3 of the printed shapes on their response sheet (range 3–110).

Results

• Control participants correctly wrote down a mean of 7.1 (SD 1=1.1) of the eight names of party-goers during the tape; five people made a false alarm.

• Doodling participants correctly wrote a mean of 7.8 (SD=0.4) names of party-goers; one person made one false alarm.

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Results

• Recall performance was scored separately for names and places, using the definitions of correct responses and false alarms above, with the addition that plausible mis-hearings had to be the same in the monitoring and recall phases

• Participants in the doodling condition recalled a mean of 7.5 pieces of information (names and places), 29% more than the mean of 5.8 recalled by the control group.

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Conclusions

Participants who performed a shape-shading task, intended as an analogue of naturalistic doodling, concentrated better on a mock telephone message than participants who listened to the message with no concurrent task.

It is not clear whether doodling led to better recall simply because doodlers noticed more of the target names or whether it aided memory directly by encouraging deeper processing of the material on the tape.

Explanations

One possibility is that doodling simply helps to stabilize arousal at an optimal level, keeping people awake or reducing the high levels of autonomic arousal often associated with boredom (London, Schubert, & Washburn, 1972).

Influence on daydreaming?

A limitation of the present study is that it lacks any measure of daydreaming.

Future neuroimaging studies could test the hypothesis that doodling selectively reduces cortical activation associated with daydreaming.

WHAT ARE THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESS?