Good presentation = good science = good sense

The wonderful TED Blog [if you are not already subscribed go and do it now. Now!] points us to a lecture by Harvard cognitive investigator Stephen Kosslyn. From his web page:

"... (we examine) the relation between imagery and perception. Recently we have begun to consider the uses of imagery in cognition more generally, and have examined individual and group differences in imagery ability."

This lecture is entitled 'Using Psychology to Avoid Common PowerPoint Errors' and builds off Prof Kosslyn's recent book, Clear & To The Point. The book is superb and believe me when I tell you there are no holes to be picked in his ideas. Kosslyn's lecture to the AAAS was built around four key principles:

• The Goldilocks Rule - presenting the "just right" amount of data on a slide and stripping out unnecessary data in charts and slides. In the example below, only the peak number and the most recent number matter - so kill off everything else and lead your audience by the nose to the salient data.

• The Rudolph Rule - if you want your audience to notice something, then it needs to stand out. The human brain, "is a difference detector," says Kosslyn, so make the thing you want to draw you audience's attention to different - size, shape, bold, italics, separation. Even a small difference will cause the human eye to notice what's important.
  

• The Rule of Four - after four items on a screen, the human brain sits back from the table, belches softly and says, "I'm full." It's not that we can't deal with more than four images up on screen at once, but why would you risk overwhelming your audience? [The other logic that immediately occurs to me here is that more than four items on a 1024 x 768 slide is going to make for some pretty small items ...] I use this gloriously appalling flowchart when I am making this point in talks:

• The Birds of a Feather Rule - if concepts or data are connected in some way, make sure you illustrate that clearly and simply to the audience. Establish a protocol for this and stick to it throughout your talks. Dick Hardt always presents against a plain white background with black text - unless he is presenting a problem or an outmoded idea, in which case he uses white text reversed out of a black background. Okay, I think we can all agree that the slide below is far too busy in the first instance and you should never present this much information in one place:
  

But if you absolutely had to, how about doing something as simple as this to get your point across?

Garr Reynolds did a review of Prof Kosslyn's book a while back that goes into more detail. Definitely one for the shelves. You can find Garr's review here and the Prof's book here.