When you’re thinking about presenting or communicating your information, it helps to begin with an understanding of how humans perceive and understand things.  Warren and I cover this in the courses we run, and we do our best to start from robust and well-researched psychological hypotheses.  A good example of this is the Gestalt theory of perception, which proposes that humans are predisposed to notice patterns (the whole) before noticing its constituent parts.

Start from the brain! Photo from Patrick Denker, Flickr Creative Commons

So one of the most interesting articles I’ve read about designing presentations comes from a senior psychologist, recently of UCLan, Dr Chris Atherton.  Chris’s blog often has interesting reflections on how her research interests overlap with developments in learning design, and her presentation at the beginning of this year to the Learning Technologies conference draws many of her conclusions together.

Chris introduces the notion that memory is intrinsically unreliable, and that if we want our presentations or information to be memorable, we need to help our audience with whatever assistance we can offer. Chris suggests that a schema, that is, a story or rule of thumb, helps us to ‘hang’ information on an existing framework.  This is the concept which underpins those articles suggesting you imagine travelling a familiar route (home to work, for example), ‘hanging’ an item you need to remember at a landmark.  Then when you reimagine that route later (in the supermarket, for example), you think, ah yes! I’m passing Mecca Bingo, that means I need to buy onions.

Chris also suggests that memory rapidly becomes overloaded in traditional presentations, as presenters ask their audience to take in large quantities of information from both the presenter themselves speaking, and their slides.  So, her tips are to reduce the amount of information you hope to impart to an audience, and to ‘hang’ it on a schema to help your audience retain it.

Chris demonstrated the efficiency of this approach in her experiments in learning design with her own students. She reduced the demands placed on her students by her choice of delivery methods (so, no slides covered with multiple bullet points, tiny writing or difficult to interpret graphs), thereby freeing their cognitive processes to focus on the content of the lectures being delivered by her as presenter.  Her results show conclusively that designing visual aids to complement what she was saying (rather than compete with it for her students’ attention) led to them retaining more information from her lectures.  Happy lecturer, happy students.

If you get a chance, do download Chris’s slides from Slideshare; they’re posted with a text commentary as, following her own rules, the slides don’t tell the whole story – the presenter does that.  But in any case, it’s worth remembering: help your audience to remember what you’re trying to get across, by limiting the amount of information you’re trying to communicate, and by providing a memorable approach, such as a story or rule of thumb.