Cognitive science improves your PowerPoint presentation
It's always nice when good solid science backs up what has been good practice for years. But in the case of the "Death by PowerPoint" epidemic sweeping boardrooms across the globe, it may be too late.
A cognitive scientist at Harvard University who has a research passion for understanding how brains process images, has applied his research to how to not bore your audience to death.
Dr Stephen Kosslyn has derived four ways to more effectively get your message off the screen and into the mind of your audience. Speaking that the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( AAAS), Dr Kosslyn explained that breakthroughs in cognitive science had revealed the best ways of making PowerPoint (or any) presentations more brain-compliant. Annalee Newitz summarised the very memorable presentation like this ...
"The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the 'just right' amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image. As an example, Kosslyn showed two graphs of real estate prices over time. One included ten different numbers, one for each year. The other included two numbers: a peak price, and the current price. For the purposes of a presentation about today's prices relative to peak price, those numbers were the only ones necessary.
"The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details - the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not make the data of interest a different colour from the list? Or circle it in red? "The human brain is a difference detector," Kosslyn noted. The eye is immediately drawn to any object that looks different in an image, whether that's due to colour, size, or separation from a group. He showed a pizza with one piece pulled out slightly, noting that our eyes would immediately go to the piece that was pulled out (which was true). Even small differences guide your audience to what's important.
"The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool that grows out of the fact that the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don't ever present your audience with more than four things at once. This is a really important piece of information for people who tend to pack their PowerPoint slides with dense reams of data. Never give more than four pieces of information at once. It's not that people can't think beyond four ideas - it's that when we take in the visual information on a slide we start to get overwhelmed when we reach four items.
"The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. "We think of things in groups when they look similar or in proximity to each other," Kosslyn pointed out. Translation into PowerPoint? If you want to indicate to your audience that five things belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same colour or shape. Or group them very close together. This sounds basic, but it often means taking your data apart and reorganising it. Kosslyn's co-panellist, Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky, explained that one of the fundamental principles of data visualization is, ironically, misrepresentation in order to get at the truth."
Even these goofy names for each rule of PowerPoint follow a principle from cognitive science: it's always easier to remember an unfamiliar idea if it's named after something familiar.
Good communicators (including financial guru Guy Kawasaki) have used these basic principles for many years. Check out our previous article The 10, 20, 30 Rule of PowerPoint .
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