In our never ending quest to make presentations better, we’ve invited Dr. Carmen Simon(formerly Taran) to guest author a new series on Better PowerPoint. Dr. Simon is a cognitive scientist, a leader in the virtual presentation movement, and an internationally renowned public speaker. Dr. Simon is a founder of Rexi Media, a world wide presentation consulting firm. This is part three in a series based on her research published this year. Be sure to read Part One and Part Two.

Last week, we discussed the possibility of making slides more memorable by using the forbidden element in PowerPoint: text. We promised a quiz too. Without looking at the previous article, use the comments section below to share with us what content you remember from it. 

This week, we address the point of where in a deck to place your most important information for maximum retention.

You may have heard of the primacy and recency effects, according to which people tend to remember items from the beginning and ending of a list a lot more than items in the middle of a list (depending on the presence of a distracter task, the speed of the presentation, and the list length). These observations are typically linked to short-term memory recall tests.

Figure 1. Items at the beginning and ending of a list tend to be more memorable in short-term memory tests

When long-term memory is concerned, and given a longer list length (conditions that describe the present study), researchers have observed that people make a fixed number of searches for items in the long-term store, and the probability of retrieving a particular item is lower when there are more items. This observation matches the findings in our study, where the first slide in all 26 conditions did not receive a high recall rate (in both shuffled and non-shuffled decks). The deck in our study contained 20 slides, and memory was tested after 48 hours; by contrast, most tests on primacy and recency effects contain approximately 10 items and memory is tested immediately after viewing the list.

In more recent studies, some researchers have found significant serial positioning when analyzing the recall rate of commercials broadcast during the Super Bowl. They discovered that commercials presented during the first batch of ads were remembered significantly better than commercials displayed in the middle or at the end of the program. Since alcohol and tedium that may occur during a football game are likely to interfere with a study, other researchers replicated the research in lab conditions, and asked students to view 15 commercials. In a long-term test, they observed that the primacy effect held strong, while the recency effect faded.

Figure 2. Primacy effect may be stronger in long-term memory, so consider placing more effort in the design of the introductory slides

Reflecting on serial positioning effects, several researchers have proposed various explanations for the primacy and recency effects. They remarked that the first and last items in a list might be recalled better because, when analyzed globally, the beginning and ending are more distinct; their sheer positioning attracts more attention. Viewers may pay less and less attention to each item as the list progresses, thus creating a primacy effect.

This gradient model of attention could be applied to explain some of the findings in our research study: people tended to remember slides from the first half of the presentation (i.e., 6, 7, 8, and 9), and memory faded towards the end. The practical guideline derived from these observations is to consider placing the most important parts of a presentation in the first half of an on-demand PowerPoint file. If you have other content elements that need to be remembered but they are placed towards the end of the deck, it means that more design effort needs to be placed at the end of the deck.

More about how this can be accomplished next week.

In our never ending quest to make presentations better, we’ve invited Dr. Carmen Simon(formerly Taran) to guest author a new series on Better PowerPoint.  Dr. Simon is a cognitive scientist, a leader in the virtual presentation movement, and an internationally renowned public speaker. Dr. Simon is a founder of Rexi Media, a world wide presentation consulting firm. This is part two in a series based on her research published this year. Part One can be found here. 

Part Two: Can you control what people remember from a PowerPoint presentation?

Last week, I mentioned the study on how much people remembered from an on-demand PowerPoint presentation of 20 slides after 48 hours. The answer: 4 slides. One of the remaining questions: can we control which slides? The study results showed that approximately 1,500 people remembered slides according to a pattern.

Here is the content included in the slides that people remembered more frequently:

• Slide 6: Don’t wear stripes because they dance around on the screen and are distracting. If you wear anything distracting in a webcast, people will remember that and nothing you say.
• Slide 7: Don’t wear white. It glows and it becomes the most noticeable thing on the video screen.
• Slide 8: Pastel shirts work well on video.
• Slide 9: Don’t wear black, it is too harsh and can suck up all the light.

The purpose of this week’s article is to show you how we can influence what people remember. Use these characteristics next time you create a PowerPoint presentation.

Concrete Visual Language. Participants in the study tended to remember the same slides even though those slides did not contain pictures. This may be because the text was highly visual, in the sense that it generated mental pictures (e.g., don’t wear white, black or stripes). This observation matches research from advertising, according to which high-imagery words are remembered a lot better than low-imagery or abstract words.¹ This is great news because many presenters complain that they do not have time or money to find and purchase expensive images for all slides in their decks. If you have highly visual language, you can save on other resources.

Visual language is typically concrete language. In general, concrete words are easier to remember than abstract words because concrete labels can be encoded in two separate ways, one involving an image and the other involving a verbal code or meaning. Notice how in the example below, the concrete words would be a lot easier to remember than the abstract ones.

Figure 1. Concrete words are easier to remember than abstract ones because they are dually encoded: they have a verbal code and an image code.

Dare to insert text-based slides in your presentation, with the condition that people can “picture” that text without much mental effort.

Chunking. The frequently recalled slides could be “grouped” around the same topic (what to wear and what not to wear). People remembered these slides in the conditions where slides were shuffled, so the slides above did not appear in sequence. Slides with tight links are remembered more than slides with weak links. For your next presentation, wonder how easy it would be for viewers to identify a few groups (preferably no more than 3) in your presentation. Sometimes, the error that people make is to provide too many groups or not specify how slides relate to a certain group.

Color coordination can often help group slides together. Notice how in the example below, there are four sections, each indicated by its own color.

Figure 2. Color can help chunk various parts of a presentation

The cautionary part about using colors to group slides in a presentation is that memory works on a chaining mechanism. The recall of an item depends on its predecessors, and items that appear later in the chain (or in this case, slides that appear later in the presentation) depend on the accurate recall of previous items. While color helps with chunking, it may not provide a link that is strong enough between various items.

For your next presentation, ask this question: if I asked viewers to relate slides at the end to slides at the beginning, would they be able to easily form a connection? Often endings are rushed. Presenters run out of time and often there is more emphasis on particular content than on connections between different parts of the presentation. Keep in mind that connections between content parts are just as important to memory as discussing individual content parts. Each time you introduce a new content piece, ask and answer: how does it integrate with everything else?

Novelty. Participants in the study who identified themselves as novices in the topic of webcasting (the content for the presentations they were asked to remember), tended to remember more slides than those who considered themselves experts. This may be explained by looking at a psychological construct called schemas —cognitive frameworks that help us organize and interpret information around us. Schemas influence the way new information is processed and they guide our expectations of what should occur. When information deviates from existing schema, attention is enhanced, which may lead to better recall. Research in advertising hints at a similar fact: those viewers exposed to unfamiliar ads engage in more extensive processing and those exposed to familiar ads are less engaged and involved in more confirmation-based processing.

Sometimes experts “brush over” information, thinking they already know it and therefore not much is retained. A practical guideline is that if you want a presentation to attract attention, find out what your audience would consider novel. A thorough audience analysis can be revealing.

Repetition was another trait shared by the four most recalled slides. The word “wear” was repeated several times, such as in what to wear or not to wear (e.g., don’t wear stripes, black, or white; and wear pastels). Linking this to the idea of clustering, research suggests that during recall, words that are repeated along some dimension are recalled successively.² Practically speaking, it may be beneficial for content designers to use similarity of items that are important in a presentation to be recalled. The example below shows how in a professional presentation, words such as RPM, Revenue, and Revolution are repeated on a few slides, making these terms more likely to be recalled later.

Figure 3. Example of repetition in a PowerPoint presentation

Negativity. Another characteristic of the four popular slides is that they contained negative information (e.g., “don’t wear stripes, don’t wear white, don’t wear black”). Several other researchers contend³ that negative information is more memorable in the sense that people tend to remember more details. This may be because the right fusiform gyrus, a region in the brain responsible for processing exemplar-specific details, displays higher activity during the successful encoding of negative objects. If recalling details is important to you, then expressing content in negative terms may be a solution to consider. If remembering the gist of the information is sufficient, then positive content is suitable.

Vanity. Slides that reported a high recall in the study were slides that offered advice that made the viewers “look good” (e.g. avoid wearing white, black or stripes in a webcast; wear pastels). In a society that craves portraying positive images, it is understandable that ego enhancing content attracts additional attention, which may translate into improved recall. Notice in the example below how the self-boosting messages (paired up with concrete words), may lead to attention and improved recall. We will quiz you next week to see if it worked.

Figure 4. Ego-boosting content leads to better recall

Citations
¹Unnava, H. R., Burnkrant, R. E., & Erevelles, S. (1994). Effects of presentation order and communication modality on recall and attitude. Journal of Consumer Research, 21, 481–490.
²Howard,M.W., & Kahana, M. J. (2002). When does semantic similarity help episodic retrieval? Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 85–98.
³Kensinger, E. A., Garoff-Eaton, R. J., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Effects of emotion on memory specificity: Memory trade-offs elicited by negative visually arousing stimuli. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 575-591.

In our never ending quest to make presentations less boring , we’ve invited Dr. Carmen Simon(formerly Taran) to guest author a new series on Better PowerPoint.  Dr. Simon is a cognitive scientist, a leader in the virtual presentation movement, and an internationally renowned public speaker. Dr. Simon is a founder of Rexi Media, a world wide presentation consulting firm. This is part one (including study background) in a series based on her research published this year. 

I have recently completed a study that examined the intersection of cognitive psychology and communication from the perspective of one tool: PowerPoint. I was motivated to carry the study because I have noticed these three trends in the past decade:

A dichotomy in information processing habits: on one hand, we crave information (spending 60+ hours a week on line, consuming content), and on the other, we grumble how we are overwhelmed by so much information.

Ubiquitous use of PowerPoint for information processing, particularly as a standalone offering (a quick search through Slideshare.net confirms the growing trend of on-demand PowerPoint presentations).

PowerPoint-based presentations that look very similar, making it more difficult for messages to stand out (how many presentations have you seen lately where either you can’t remember who created them or they looked similar to something else you saw months ago?).

These observations invite the question: how does one distinguish a particular on-demand PowerPoint presentation, given existing informational noise and competition?

Study Methodology

1,540 subjects participated in the study, where I started with a very basic question applied to a very basic on-demand presentation: How many slides does a viewer remember, on average, from a text-only, standalone online PowerPoint presentation containing 20 slides? To answer this question, I used the isolation effect theory, according to which, items (in this case slides) that stand out in some way from a homogenous list have a higher likelihood of being recalled.

Study Results

1. Participants remembered an average of 4 slides from a 20-slide, standalone, text-only PowerPoint presentation.
2. Neutral visuals help, but they don’t change the rule of 4. There was a statistically significant difference between the recall of content in text-only slides versus slides that contained text and neutral visuals. However, the recall rate did not exceed 4 slides in any of the 26 PowerPoint deck manipulations included in the study.
3. Participants tended to remember the same content, not slides at random, as was predicted. This means that it may be possible to control what people remember by using a certain set of criteria.
4. For standing out, 5 is an important number. Applying the isolation effect every n^th slide (3^rd, 4^th, or 5^th) did not impact the overall recall of an entire deck.However, when a change was made every 5^th position (i.e., slides 5, 10, 15, and 20), those slides tended to be remembered better than any other randomly selected slides from that deck. The reverse was true for slides changed in every 3^rd and 4^th position.

These findings can be linked to a set of practical and immediately transferable guidelines for anyone who creates on-demand presentations. Let’s start with the first one.

Part One:  The Magic Number Four

No article on memory capacity and short-term memory can escape without quoting Miller’s classic “seven plus or minus two”, which has often been used in the fields of psychology and education as pillars for creating guidelines on information processing and communication design. Back in the 50s, Miller contended that there is a limit in the number of items that working memory can retain (namely, 7±2).

Other researchers have since questioned the limitations of memory capacity, suggesting that the new magic number is 4±1, and that people form clusters of no more than three or four items to recall. When memorizing lists, some researchers observed that items in a list entered a fixed-capacity rehearsal buffer and displaced a randomly selected item already there, when the capacity of approximately four items had been exceeded. Newer research suggests that the capacity for visual working memory is limited to four items. In a “list” or PowerPoint presentation of 20 slides, if information after 4 slides starts to be displaced by other items that were just viewed, it makes sense that the average recall rate would be 4 slides from the entire list. The good news is that if we know that the amount of slides people remember is limited, that means we don’t have to try so hard on every single slide we present.

Let’s Test What You’ve Learned.  Which is Better?

Even though this study was created in an on-demand setting, let’s reflect how this would apply in a face-to-face setting, where a presenter is involved. Imagine that someone had to present the file below. Can you sense how everything is so intense on every slide and each slide may have taken a long time and quite a bit of money to develop?

And at the opposite end, can you tell how “weak” the content is in the example below, where someone did not take that much time to place text in a sequence of slides?

So, which way is better?

Surprisingly, while both examples may have good content, they are equally bad where memory is concerned. This is because when everything is equally intense or equally weak, something has got to give. In an environment where there is a presenter, the content has a chance because the presenter can do something to deviate from sameness (e.g., invite participants to answer questions, participate in a group exercise, or switch from PowerPoint to a software demo).

In an on-demand situation, the slides are all you’ve got. How do you control which slides people remember? More about that next week.