Fidgeting: An Update

As a response to my April post on Fidgeting, Tracy (co-creator of the awesome travel blog the195.com) pointed me to an interesting Wired article on a paper about the cognitive purpose of doodling. Here's the link:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/doodlerecall/

Here's an excerpt in case you don't want to read the whole thing:

"Andrade’s team asked 40 people to listen to a recording containing the names of people and places. Afterwards the people wrote down the names they could remember.

While listening, half of the test subjects were also required to shade in shapes on a piece of paper. Afterwards, they remembered one-third more names than test subjects who didn’t doodle while listening"

Just as I had suspected, based on my own extremely unscientific self-observation! Based on the paper's hypothesis, these results should apply not only to sketching, but also to other "small cognitive load" activities, e.g. fidgeting with a paperclip.

Thanks, Tracy!


Original Paper: "What does doodling do?" By Jackie Andrade. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 3, Feb. 26, 2009.