Emotional visuals can help or hurt your presentation
Recalling the plot of a really boring movie takes some serious mental gymnastics.
Why is it so tough? Chances are it’s because you didn’t care about the (bland) characters and their (dull) problems. In other words, you weren’t emotionally invested in the movie.
While researching neuroscience-based studies for my book, Impossible to Ignore, I noticed that emotion is the second-most-discussed variable in relation to memory (the first is repetition).
Abundant behavioral and neuroscientific studies confirm the impact of emotion on recall. In one study, scientists asked two groups of people to watch a slideshow. The first group saw a slideshow about a woman going on an uneventful date. The second group saw the same slideshow, except the ending was tweaked so that the woman was attacked by her date.
Can you guess which slideshow people remembered more?
People in the second group remembered their slideshow more than those in the first group. The emotional story was remembered more than the neutral one. This discovery has profound implications for presenters, particularly when creating a visual presentation.
Emotional visuals can overshadow your presentation
When we have a strong emotional reaction to something, we tend to focus exclusively on what’s generating that reaction. All other details get drowned out.
I once ran a study where I observed how much content people remember from a 20-slide presentation. In some conditions, several slides included an emotional picture, such as someone skiing on sand or performing a yoga pose to reach their laptop. People who saw the emotional pictures tended to remember them, but they didn’t remember the context for those pictures.
When we use emotionally charged imagery or language, we must be prepared to sacrifice peripheral details. This spotlight effect explains why you can enjoy a funny or profound commercial, only to realize you have no clue what was advertised.
Whether you’re creating a million-dollar commercial, or a humble PowerPoint, it’s vital that the words and visuals in an emotionally charged section are integral parts of one another. Otherwise, the audience will miss the message your emotions were supposed to drive home.
“When we use emotionally charged imagery or language, we must be prepared to sacrifice peripheral details.” – Dr. Carmen Simon
Emotion and message must work together in a visual presentation
It’s vital that emotionally charged imagery amplifies – rather than detracts from – your presentation.
There are two principles of grouping we can use to make this happen: continuation and proximity. In both sets of examples below, one image uses these principles correctly and the other does not.
Notice how, in the images on the left, the viewer is likely to look at the image first and then continue processing the slide by looking at the text. The continuity is broken because the eyes have to “jump” from picture to text, not establishing a strong association between the two.
Now look at the images on the right. Notice how your eyes “flow” from the picture to the text, giving you the chance to associate them better. This type of continuation adds coherence to the slide, makes it integrated, and the brain processes the information as one unit.
This is because of continuation and proximity. Continuation occurs when the eyes move from one object to the next, with objects arranged on a line or curve perceived as more related. Proximity occurs when elements that are placed together are perceived as being part of the same group.
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