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The best visuals for learning
What kind of pictures best grab attention and thus transfer information?
We pay lots of attention to color. We pay lots of attention to orientation. We
pay lots of attention to size. And we pay special attention if the object is in
motion. Indeed, most of the things that threatened us in the Serengeti
moved
, and the brain has evolved unbelievably sophisticated trip wires to
detect motion. We even have specialized regions to distinguish when our
eyes are moving versus when our world is moving. These regions routinely
shut down perceptions of eye movement in favor of the environmental
movement.
That said, we need more research into practical applications. The
pictorial superiority effect is a well-established fact for certain types of
classroom material, but not for all material. Data are sparse. Do pictures
communicate conceptual ideas such as “freedom” and “amount” better than,
say, a narrative? Are language arts better represented in picture form or
using other media? It’s unclear.
Include video or animation
I owe my career choice to Donald Duck. I am not joking. I even
remember the moment he convinced me. I was 8 years old at the time, and
my mother trundled the family off to a showing of an amazing 27-minute
animated short called
Donald in Mathmagic Land
. Using visual imagery, a
wicked sense of humor, and the wide-eyed wonder of an infant, Donald
Duck introduced me to math. Got me excited about it. From geometry to
football to playing billiards, the power and beauty of mathematics were
made so real for this nerd-in-training, I asked if I could see it a second time.
My mother obliged, and the effect was so memorable, it eventually
influenced my career choice. I now have a copy of those valuable 27
minutes in my own home and regularly inflict it upon my poor children.
Donald in Mathmagic Land
won an Academy Award for best animated
short of 1959. It also should have gotten a Teacher of the Year award. The
film illustrates—literally—the power of the moving image in
communicating complex information to students.
Animating presentations is another way to capture the importance not
only of color and placement but also of motion. The basics are not hard to
learn. With today’s software, anybody who knows how to draw a square
and a circle can create simple animations. Simple two-dimensional pictures
are quite adequate; studies show that if the drawings are too complex or
lifelike, they can distract from the transfer of information.
Communicate with pictures more than words
“Less text, more pictures” were almost fighting words in 1982. They
were used derisively to greet the arrival of
USA Today,
a brand-new type of
newspaper with, as you know, less text, more pictures. Some predicted the
style would never work. Others predicted that if it did, the style would spell
the end of Western civilization as the newspaper-reading public knows it.
The jury may be out on the latter prediction, but the former has a powerful
and embarrassing verdict. Within four years,
USA Today
had the second-
highest readership of any newspaper in the country, and within 10 years, it
was number one. It still is.
What happened? Pictorial information may be initially more attractive
to consumers, in part because it takes less effort to comprehend. Because it
is also a more efficient way to glue information to a neuron, there may be
strong reasons for entire marketing departments to think seriously about
making pictorial presentations their primary way of transferring
information.
The initial effect of pictures on attention has been tested. Using infrared
eye-tracking technology, 3,600 consumers were tested on 1,363 print
advertisements. The conclusion? Pictorial information was superior in
capturing attention—independent of its size. Even if the picture was small
and crowded with lots of other nonpictorial elements close to it, the eye
went to the visual.
Toss your PowerPoint presentations
The presentation software called PowerPoint has become ubiquitous,
from work meetings to college classrooms to conferences. What’s wrong
with that? They’re mostly text, even though they don’t have to be. A typical
PowerPoint business presentation has nearly 40 words
per slide
. Please, do
two things: (1) Burn your current PowerPoint presentations. (2) Make new
ones. Then see which one works better.
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