Presentations and the rules of attention
Chris Atherton is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Lancashire and her academic interest is in visual perception. She says her studies, combined with her short attention span (her blog is called Finite Attention Span) have led her to focus on what we can do to make presentations better. She calls it, “attentionomics”.
She says much that is insightful in her post “When giving presentations, the only rule that matters is the rule of attention.” Here’s the best snippet (in case you too suffer from a short attention span):
Concentrate on the rules of attention. The thing you most want during a presentation is people’s attention, so everything you do and say has to be about capturing that, and then keeping it. The rules of attention are more or less universal, easier to demonstrate empirically than rules about specific slide formats, and can be neatly summarised as follows: people get bored easily.
Here’s some more great points from Chris I hadn’t heard anybody else say before, along with my thoughts on them:
Stories help keep people’s attention
We’ve been listening to stories and learning through stories for as long as we’ve had language. When told a story, we always want to learn what happened next, even if so far we haven’t enjoyed the story very much. Can you make a story out of your presentation? I can remember several talks I’ve given where the feedback afterwards was, “I don’t really remember what you talked about but I really enjoyed listening to the story you told.” If you can’t make the learning stick, being an entertaining speaker is good consolation!
People really like looking at screens
It’s true. I could be in a pub, sitting across from the sexiest woman in the world, she may be part-way through telling me how much she wants to take me to bed, and my attention will constantly be distracted by the colours and movement of the sport channel on the flat-screen TV on the wall behind her. And I’m not a fan of spectator sports.
I’m a male human, I’ve evolved as an endurance hunter of small game, and the visual processing part of my brain is wired to be distracted by fast moving, brightly coloured objects. Believe me, I want to have sex with the woman (especially because the sexiest woman in the world happens to be the woman I’m married to) and I know my flickering attention is going to make that much less likely, but I just can’t help it — I’m wired that way.
Screens are almost a compulsory part of modern presentations, and their very attractiveness makes them both your best friend and your worst adversary. If your slides are good and you need an audience to stop looking at your slides and focus on what you have to say for a moment, you really have your work cut out for you.
Chris recommends using the B or W buttons on the keyboard, which in both PowerPoint and Keynote will make the screen go black or white, respectively. Now, she says, people will focus on you, at least until you hit that B or W button again.
True, but when I’m talking, I’m usually far away from a keyboard, and interrupting my flow to walk over to where the keyboard is and hit a button is usually going to create an even bigger distraction from what I have to say than leaving my slide up there.
My workaround (your mileage may vary) is to have a black slide ready to go up while I talk. I believe black works better than white, since black conveys a sense of anticipation and a big white space on a really big screen can be such a change in room lighting that people will look away to allow their eyes to adjust (which is exactly what I don’t want them to do.)
Remember to take your black slides out of your presentation before posting them to your blog or slideshare.
If you need to use an arresting image to hold your audience's attention, make sure it's somehow relevant, and make sure it's something they're not likely to have seen before. (Photo: Last Mariner)
Sustaining attention needs frequent changes
Chris talks about the need for frequent changes in a presentation if you’re to keep people’s attention focused on you, which is true, but the most important thing is to “…change stuff mindfully.”
By that she means, don’t just dump in a bit of clip art or a photo at some random point. Changes have to be inserted so that one idea flows to the next idea but the changes refresh the mind. I find that establishing a rhythm can help you do this. For instance, aim for one surprising slide at the end of each major point instead of the more typical “before we get started, here’s a surprising/funny photo or a shocking statistic on my first slide.”
If you’re going to aim to shock, amuse or surprise your audience with a change, please, please, please test it first on a small sample of likely audience members. Nothing falls flatter than a YouTube clip that your audience has already been sent way too many times by email, a photo that likewise has been over-exposed, or a statistic or study that you think is shocking but has already been critically reviewed and debunked by the opinion-leaders your audience follows.
Thumbnail photo ‘Distracted‘ by Left-Hand.
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New blog post: Presentations and the rules of attention http://bit.ly/3PlY68
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Quick read to help to hold your audience’s attention – stressing also mindful changes and sequences not random shocks just to keep the audience awake.
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