In one experiment, participants shading simple shapes remembered 29% more information from a dull telephone message. Larger follow-up studies found the benefit is not universal—and taking notes may work better.
That coworker sketching circles during a meeting may not be ignoring the presentation. Research suggests that simple, repetitive drawing can sometimes help people retain information while listening. But the evidence is more complicated than the familiar claim that doodling helps everybody concentrate.
The best-known finding comes from psychologist Jackie Andrade at the University of Plymouth, whose study, first published online in February 2009, found that people assigned a simple shape-shading task recalled 29% more information than people who listened without shading. Later investigations, including studies in the United States and Canada, produced mixed results.
The experiment behind the 29% finding
Andrade recruited 40 participants to listen to a deliberately monotonous, approximately two-and-a-half-minute recorded telephone message describing people who would attend a party. All participants were instructed to monitor the recording for information about attendees. Half were also asked to shade printed circles and squares while listening.
After the message, participants were unexpectedly tested on their recall of names and places. Those assigned to shading recalled an average of 7.5 pieces of information, versus 5.8 in the control group—about 29% more. The shading group also performed better at monitoring the target names. The researchers described doodling as potentially helpful in this low-demand listening task, not as a proven universal learning strategy.
Source: Andrade, “What Does Doodling Do?” Applied Cognitive Psychology (2009 online; 2010 issue).
Why might doodling help?
Andrade suggested that simple shading could reduce the tendency to drift into more distracting thoughts during an uninteresting task. A repetitive physical activity may occupy just enough attention to prevent a more complete mental disengagement.
However, the original experiment did not directly measure mind-wandering. Whether preventing daydreaming explains the observed memory benefit remained a hypothesis for later research to test.
U.S. researchers found that the type of drawing matters
In a 2017 study, researchers Jason Bruce Boggs, Jillian Lane Cohen and Gwen C. Marchand at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, randomly assigned 93 undergraduate participants to listen to a fictional conversation about an earthquake while either listening without drawing, performing structured doodling, doodling freely or taking notes.
Participants in the free-doodling group performed significantly worse on a subsequent recall task than participants in the structured-doodling and note-taking groups. The findings warn against treating simple shape-shading and more elaborate freehand drawing as interchangeable activities.
Source: Boggs, Cohen and Marchand, “The Effects of Doodling on Recall Ability,” Psychological Thought (2017).
A larger follow-up challenged the broader claim
Psychologists Emily Krysten Spencer-Mueller and Mark J. Fenske at the University of Guelph examined 222 participants across two experiments. One involved a short voicemail after a boring lecture segment; another used a longer lecture and compared structured doodling, unstructured doodling, note-taking and listening alone.
Across the two experiments, researchers did not find that doodling consistently reduced boredom or mind-wandering or improved attention or memory. Participants concentrating on note-taking performed best on the tested measures.
What the findings mean for meetings and classrooms
Someone drawing in a notebook should not automatically be judged inattentive. Visible behavior alone cannot establish what a person is processing. Yet the research does not justify a blanket recommendation that doodling improves learning or workplace performance.
The original finding concerned a short, artificial listening task. Real meetings and classrooms can involve complicated explanations, visual presentations, decisions and detailed note-taking. In these settings, the available evidence suggests that note-taking is often a more dependable approach than freeform doodling.
The unanswered questions
Scientists still need to determine which tasks, kinds of repetitive movement and individual differences might affect whether doodling helps, hinders or has no effect. It remains unclear whether benefits persist over longer periods or improve performance in real-world meetings.
For now, the defensible conclusion is modest: doodling is not necessarily a sign someone has mentally switched off, but a 29% advantage in one experiment does not mean everyone should doodle to remember more.
Research sources
- Andrade (2009/2010): What Does Doodling Do?
- Boggs, Cohen and Marchand (2017): The Effects of Doodling on Recall Ability
- Spencer-Mueller and Fenske (2024): Note-taking for the win
Related video: Sunni Brown, “Doodlers, Unite!” (TED). This presentation is commentary on doodling, not evidence that the original study’s result generalizes to every setting.
