by Olivia Mitchell | Presentation research
People perceive someone who speaks up as a competent leader – regardless of whether they actually are competent. That’s the finding of a fascinating research study that has just been reported online at Time. The research study 68 students were divided into...
by Olivia Mitchell | Presentation research
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”....
by Olivia Mitchell | Content, Powerpoint, Presentation research
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...
by Olivia Mitchell | Powerpoint, Presentation research
In the days of overhead projectors, we’d slide a piece of paper down the transparency to reveal information step-by-step. That’s the Overhead Projector Paradigm. When you’re stuck in this paradigm, you’re not using the full power of PowerPoint....
by Olivia Mitchell | Powerpoint, Presentation research
Many of us know intuitively that having lots of bullet-points on our slides isn’t effective. But it’s useful to have some scientific evidence to back up that intuition. New research on multitasking may provide that. In the research carried out at the...
by Olivia Mitchell | Nervousness, Presentation research
If you get nervous about speaking in public, the recently published results from a scientific experiment on mice, should give you some hope. The experiment showed that mice that had been trained to feel calm, coped better with stressful situations. The mice were...