Getting back into the swing of things today! It's nice to be home.
I want to bring your attention to these slides from a talk by Dr. Chris Atherton from the University of Central Lancashire. She talks about the brain's limits of attention and cognitive load, and how we can work around these limitations to make the greatest impact on audience attention and retention.
In short: Traditional slides loaded with text, bullets and clutter don't work! Yep, more research to back up the need for less text and more images. Yay!
Like any good slide show, these visuals are not meant to stand alone. You can get the gist of the presentation from the slides, so do take a look, below. But then head over to Olivia Mitchell's blog, where she has explained the research more thoroughly with the help of the slides and with Dr. Atherton's comments. This is a presentation I would love to see live!
'Having anything on a screen invites people to look at it, the same way their gaze would keep returning to a TV screen in a pub. Since you can’t control the audience’s visual attention, it’s all about controlling what visual information you make available at any given moment, and minimising what is there so it’s not distracting from the spoken narrative, while also ensuring that it is congruent with what you are actually saying.'"
Also, I'm so sorry to hear about your mom - this must be a difficult and frightening time for you. I hope she continues to improve.
Thanks for stopping by, Chris. Let me know when you have video up and I'll post it. And thanks for the positive thoughts for my mom. She's improving. Slowly, but improving!