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Chapter 20 - PowerPoint: Avoiding the Slide to Damnation

from Section 5 - Technologies Old and New

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2022

By
Guy Undrill  and
Fiona McMaster
Edited by
Sarah Huline-Dickens  and
Patricia Casey
Sarah Huline-Dickens
Affiliation:
Mount Gould Hospital, Plymouth
Patricia Casey
Affiliation:
Hermitage Medical Clinic, Dublin
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Summary

Psychiatrists are often called on to do presentations, of which PowerPoint slides are usually an expected component. Even more frequent is the experience of ‘death by PowerPoint’: sitting in someone else’s presentation and simultaneously experiencing both intense boredom and cognitive overload. This phenomenon has been cited for more than 20 years: ‘poor documents are so common that deciphering bad writing and bad visual design have become part of the coping skills needed to navigate in the so-called information age’ (Schriver 1997, p. xxiii). Mayer’s (2009) text is seminal in describing how this arises: there are dual channels for processing (the visual and the auditory), which both have limited capacity. The death by PowerPoint experience happens when one channel is overloaded and one channel is ignored: typically, a presenter reading text from a screen (cognitive overload – the audience cannot read and listen simultaneously) and boredom (there is no visual stimulation).

Type
Chapter
Information
Clinical Topics in Teaching Psychiatry
A Guide for Clinicians
 , pp. 235 - 249
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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