Psychology says the person filling the margins with doodles during a long Zoom call isn't checked out; a 2009 study found doodlers actually remembered about 29% more of what they heard

Picture this: you're forty minutes into a Zoom call, camera on, nodding along, when you notice your pen has quietly taken over, filling the margin of your notebook with boxes and swirls you don't remember starting. It can feel like proof that you’ve checked out. According to the study, ‘What does doodling do?’ , by psychologist Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, people who doodled while listening to a boring tape-recorded phone message remembered almost a third more of what was said afterwards than people who just sat and listened. It’s a small finding, a decade old, but it keeps coming back because it touches on something familiar to everyone who has sat through a long Zoom call.

The setup was simpler than you'd expect
In the same study, researchers recruited 40 adults and played them a two-and-a-half-minute track of someone rambling about a birthday party. The recording was interspersed with the names of guests who were coming and who were not, and a lot of irrelevant chatter about wallpaper and a rained-out holiday. Half the group just listened and took down the names of people attending. The other half were given a sheet of printed squares and circles and told to shade them in while listening, with no pressure to be neat or fast. The fun thing about the results is that no one was told there was going to be a memory test afterwards. This wasn’t doodling to look busy. It was passive low-effort shading, more like the kind of thing that happens on a call when a pen just starts moving without anyone deciding that it should.

Doodlers paid closer attention, not less
The doodling group not only did better on the surprise memory test that followed, but they were also better at listening, catching more of the actual party names in real time and making up far fewer names that were never said, according to the original paper. Overall, the doodlers remembered 29% more information on the subsequent recall test than did the non-doodlers, and the advantage held for both the names they were supposed to track and the incidental, throwaway details, like the towns people lived in, that they weren't tracking. That second part is important. It suggests doodling wasn’t just sharpening focus on the one task the participants cared about; it was also helping them take in the whole conversation more fully.


The likely reason comes down to boredom, not multitasking
It seems counterintuitive that adding a task would help someone focus on another, but Andrade’s explanation isn’t really about multitasking. It’s about the mind when it’s under-stimulated. In the research, ‘The Restless Mind,’ psychologists Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler have studied mind-wandering and found that boredom is one of the most reliable triggers for the mind to drift off and start running its own private commentary, pulling attention away from what is actually being said. The idea is that doodling gives the brain a light, repetitive task that prevents daydreaming without using up the mental resources needed to listen. In other words, the distraction may not be the doodling itself. It could be keeping out the daydreaming.

The catch is that not all doodling behaves the same way
This is where a dose of caution matters, and where later research complicates the picture. According to a 2017 study, ‘The Effects of Doodling on Recall Ability,’ by Jason Boggs, Jillian Cohen and Gwen Marchand at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, published in the journal Psychological Thought, free-form, unstructured doodling actually led to worse recall than either structured shading or plain note-taking. The type of doodling matters quite a bit.

In the experiment, 93 undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: control, structured doodling, unstructured doodling, or note-taking. After hearing a fictional dialogue about a recent earthquake, they completed a fill-in-the-blank quiz, and the unstructured doodlers scored significantly worse than both the structured doodlers and the note-takers.

So the honest takeaway here isn’t that if you doodle more, you’ll remember it all. The type of low-effort doodling was helpful in a well-designed experiment, but drawing more complex doodles hasn’t shown the same benefit and can sometimes backfire.

What this actually means for your next video call
None of this is a scientific green light to tune out of a meeting because a hand happens to be occupied. It was a small study, based on one lab task, and Andrade herself was careful to note in her own paper that the mechanism behind it, whether it’s blocking daydreaming or simply keeping arousal steady, is still a hypothesis that is worth testing further, not a settled fact. That said, it’s a reasonable, low-risk reframe for a very common practice.

If a colleague is doodling boxes and swirls on the margins of a notepad during a call, it may not be a sign of checked-out boredom so much as a small, automatic trick the brain is using to keep itself in the room. For anyone who doodles through long meetings, the science, although still cautious, suggests that the habit may be doing more work than it looks like.