Learning and Doodling

Whether they're holding a class or conducting a meeting, when people are armed with pens and paper, they always seem to find time to doodle. But why, exactly?

An article by Jackie Andrade, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology last year, attempts to answer that question. In a study designed to mimic the conditions that lead to doodling, subjects were asked to listen to a long voicemail message and write down the names of people who would be coming to an upcoming party. They were told that the tape would be a little dull, but not to worry about it because it wasn't important to remember any of it afterwards. To make the conditions as much like the real world as possible, all the participants had just finished working for an unrelated study when they were recruited, and were asked for another 5 minutes of their time before they went home.

Some of the participants were given a sheet of paper that had circles and squares printed along the right-hand side and were asked to shade in the shapes as they listened to the tape "to help relieve the boredom." The rest were not given any instruction about doodling. When the participants were finished listening to the tape, they were asked (naturally!) to remember the names of the people who would be attending the party.


In the end, participants who shaded in the shapes were a little better at writing down the names of the party-goers, and at remembering those names after they'd handed in their lists. The shading-in activity appeared to provide them with an edge over the people who just kept a list.

It's a slightly surprising finding, when you consider it in light of all of the studies that suggest multi-tasking reduces the efficiency of people who engage in it. If that's the case, why would doodling make listening or retention any better?

It looks like the brain doesn't treat all multi-tasking conditions the same way. After you learn a task so well that it doesn't require any concentration, it's pretty rare for that task to interfere with the main task. So driving while chewing gum is probably fine, but driving while talking on the cell phone is demonstrably a bad idea.

In the case of this study, the main task the participants were asked to perform was fairly boring. Doodling may have let them stay just interested enough to let them finish the task. It also may have kept participants from engaging in their own diversions, such as daydreaming, which might have compromised their performance even more.

The next time you see a lot of doodling going on in your classroom or meeting, it may be a sign that people are paying more attention.

Making Better Decisions

I was looking at Scientific American's web site last week, and happened to see one of their 60-Second Psych podcasts under the title Making a Decision? Take Your Time. The subheading provides the succint re-cap:

"A recent study shows that when faced with a decision, it's best to take some time-- relax and cool off-- so logical thinking can guide us to the best choice."


The podcast itself goes on to do a reasonably good job of summarizing the findings of a Maastricht University study where researchers took 168 students, grouped them into randomly assigned pairs, and then set them up to play the Ultimatum Game. The students were told they would be offered 10 euros, and that one of them would be assigned to split the money, while the second player would choose whether or not to accept the split. If the second player rejected the split, neither player would get any money from the game.


When researchers gave the students time between the offer and the decision to accept or reject, students were more likely to accept small offers than they were if they made the decision immediately.


The study itself was interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the discussion that followed the summary on Scientific American, where it sparked a debate on whether students who decided to take the smaller amount of money after a delay had really made a better decision than students who had rejected the offer. The re-cap definitely implies that the better choice is to accept the small offers, which offended my sense of fair play. But some readers considered a 1-2 euro offer to be anti-social as well as selfish, making rejection of such an offer a more socially responsible choice. That rationale hadn't occured to me. It makes a lot of sense to avoid rewarding undesirable behaviors.

What do you think? Does delaying decisions make for better decisions or just more practical decisions?

Book Review - iBrain

We've all heard of, and probably experienced, a generation gap-- the feeling that other generations come from a slightly different culture than our own, and understand the world through the prism of that other culture. iBrain, a recent book by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, suggests that in recent years the gap between the generations has become something deeper-- a brain gap.


Their premise is straightforward. Whenever you interact with your environment, you strengthen some neural connections and weaken others. As you interact with other people, the connections in your brain that help you interact with other people become strengthened. When you interact with computers, televisions, cell phones, and video games, the connections that make you successful at working with technology become strengthened. It stands to reason. If repeating an action didn't strengthen neural connections, then there'd be no benefit to practice or rehearsal. Just imagine: the first time you tried to play an instrument would be as good (and as bad!) as the thousandth.



But Small and Vorgan take the premise a little further. They believe digital natives, the generations that have grown up with technology, have spent so much time interacting with that technology that their brains actually work differently from the brains of digital imigrants. Focusing on the digital world has left digital natives ill-prepared to maintain people skills. Some digital natives, they contend, have been so caught up in the digital world from such an early age that they may have missed the zone of proximal development that would have allowed them to develop a reasonable level of social skill. And they devote some space to reflections on the connection technology use may have to increasing numbers of diagnoses of autism.


iBrain is divided into three parts: the first presenting the case for the brain gap between the generations; the next devoted to steps you can take to reclaim your people skills if you've been spending too much time in the digital world; and the last sharing information on how to get your technical skills up to snuff if you're still lagging behind in technology world.



Because of it's premise, the structure of the book makes sense to me; the authors are trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. For this reader, though, the material in the first section of the book deserved a more thorough presentation. A hundred pages seems like a pretty cursory look at the research that supports their premise. Still, it recaps some interesting research, and draws some conclusions worth reading.