Chris Atherton at TCUK09
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Slides from a talk by Dr Chris Atherton from the University of Central Lancashire about the brain's limits of attention and cognitive load, and how we can work around that to ensure that we still have people's attention (in education, technical communication, etc)
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Chris Atherton at TCUK09
- 1. Visual attention: a psychologist’s perspective Dr Chris Atherton School of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire
- 2. your brain is lazy, shallow, and easily distracted.
- 4. So what do you do? http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephangeyer/3020487807/sizes/o/
- 5. “so are you analysing me now, then?”
- 7. thinking perception attention memory
- 8. University of Central Lancashire
- 10. Preston
- 11. Andy
- 12. Where is the educational merit ... • ... in row after row of bullet points? • Students are expected to sit there for two hours • I get antsy if I don’t check Twitter for 10 minutes
- 13. education as endurance event http://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/1800877044/
- 14. education needs to embrace instructional design!
- 16. technical communication needs to embrace psychology
- 18. Gestalt grouping principles
- 19. continuity
- 20. similarity
- 21. proximity
- 22. 9-dot problem
- 23. 3 2 4 1 start here
- 24. there is no square!
- 25. we group objects faster based on proximity ...
- 26. ... than we do based on colour or shape (Quinlan & Wilton, 1998)
- 27. for what/where decisions, the brain hacks itself!
- 28. what/where pathways where? visual cortex what?
- 29. farming out tasks to separate pathways buys more processing power
- 30. “attentionomics”
- 32. Experiment :
- 33. gloat sprout bring their bench stock train whole
- 35. glack sprut slaff blup prib kreeb frall sowl
- 36. the “magic number 7” (± 2) (Miller, 1956)
- 37. magic number 4 ? (Cowan, 2001)
- 38. subitization
- 39. subitization
- 40. subitization
- 41. max. working memory load: 4-5 things
- 42. working memory capacity is limited — but hackable.
- 43. cognitive load = amount of work needed to understand or learn something
- 44. intrinsic cognitive load: how inherently difficult something is
- 45. C B D B C A A F E
- 46. extraneous cognitive load: extra work imposed by the thinking/learning environment
- 47. A has a reciprocal relationship with B and with C. B C B has a reciprocal relationship with A but only receives incoming information from C A C has a reciprocal relationship with A but not with B, to which it feeds forward.
- 48. good instructional design is all about reducing extraneous load
- 49. the hack: farm out work to the brain’s different pathways
- 50. visual/auditory pathways visual cortex auditory cortex
- 51. we LOVE audiovisual stimulation! http://moviescreenshots.blogspot.com/
- 52. so why isn’t this any good?
- 53. does pictures does language (spoken or written)
- 54. Death by PowerPoint: bored overloaded
- 55. ... our research
- 58. “why can’t education be like that?”
- 60. study 1 (in the lab)
- 61. traditional bullet-points with occasional diagrams
- 62. sparse text only
- 63. sparse text with diagrams
- 64. identical auditory track in each condition
- 65. MCQ performance
- 66. 9. If an advertising campaign has 60 Gross Rating Points (GRPs), the advert could reach: traditional (a) 60% of the target audience once, or 15% of the audience four times (b) 30% of the target audience once, or 15% of the audience two times sparse text (c) 30% of the audience twice, and 40% of the audience four times (d) 60% of the audience once, and 10% of the audience four times sparse text, graphics
- 67. ... no difference between groups
- 69. What do you remember about the main part of the presentation? Please write as much as you can ... How advertising can be useful to a product but that there is a fine line between successful and negative advertising. Identified key factors affecting the success of advertising, such as exposure and an adverts relation to the product. Frequency of exposure can have a detrimental effect on the success of an advert. Consumers should be made aware of a product but not bombarded. Advertisers must concern themselves with selecting suitable mediums to reach desired audiences at the right frequency of risk the advert not affecting the consumer
- 70. number of themes written about * = significant difference
- 71. In other words, slides that look like this: help students learn better than slides that look like this:
- 72. study 2 (in the lecture theatre)
- 73. Again, students either saw slides like this ... ... or slides like this:
- 74. MCQ performance = same
- 76. significant (p < .05) no. of themes written about 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 traditional sparse slides slides
- 77. either ... (a) sparse slides lead to fewer competing attentional demands
- 78. or ... (b) sparse visual cues lead to better encoding of information
- 79. implications for instructional design and tech comms?
- 80. less is more! max. working memory load: 4-5 things
- 81. split the load pictures words
- 82. make the brain’s native skills work for you
- 83. your brain is lazy, shallow, and easily distracted.
- 85. finiteattentionspan.wordpress.com Twitter: @finiteattention
- 86. Thank you to: Dr Andy Morley Olivia Mitchell Simon Bostock TCUK 2009 committee