New research: warning about story-telling

The guru of multimedia learning Richard Mayer has just published a new paper that all presenters should take note of. The paper is called “Increased interestingness of extraneous details in a multimedia science presentation leads to decreased learning”.

The research

Students received one of two PowerPoint presentations about how a cold virus infects the human body.

Both PowerPoint presentations included interesting but irrelevant details about viruses. In the first presentation the details were of high-interest eg: the role of viruses in sex and death. In the second presentation the details were of low-interest eg: health tips about viruses. [Read more]

New scientific research on memory

I love having scientific back-up for the way we do things as presenters. So I subscribe to a number of cognitive science blogs to keep up-to-date. Here are two research studies on memory. The first one backs up what we already know – we’ve got a great memory for visual detail. And the second has a new twist on the impact of novelty on memory.

1. Don’t use cliched photos

Your audience can instantly recognise photos and images that they’ve seen before. And most people, when they see something they’ve seen before will say to themselves “Seen that before, boring”. That’s not the kind of impact you want. [Read more]