3 Ways To Get Your Audience's Attention In Your Speech, According To Science
When you weigh your options, your brain does several things. It reads each number, looks at the list of options, performs calculations and remembers the results, and performs more calculations at the same time until the problem is solved. This temporary storage of information needed to accomplish cognitive tasks is the general definition of working memory -- and it's very important in business presentations.
How could this be? If you consider the mental calculations required to get the correct answer in the exercise above (you may find, it's a B), they are no different than what you ask your audience to do: look at a set of items and keep those items in mind long enough to draw conclusions. Some people equate working memory with short-term memory, but there are subtle differences. Short-term memory involves storing information without manipulating it. Working memory means that you are doing something with the information in the moment. If someone gives you a list of 10 US presidents and asks you to memorize and recite their names, it's short term storage. However, if they ask you to recite the names in alphabetical order, that's working memory.
Likewise, when you present information to audience members, you're not just asking them to remember what you shared. You also ask them to keep your main idea in mind, understand it, picture it in the context of their business, focus on a specific project, plan for the future, and more. All of these tasks require working memory. So, how can you use working memory in a meaningful and effective way in your next demonstration? Here are three ideas supported by cognitive science:
1. Manage distractions
If you have too many similar items in your presentation, you'll introduce distractions -- a working memory killer. Imagine a slide in a presentation with images on the left and text on the right, a format that occurs on most slides. After a while, the information comes together.
Distractions can be active (meaning items from previous talks are too similar to yours) or retroactive (meaning items that are too similar to what the audience encountered after your meeting). Retrospective interference is important because people often associate forgetting with the passage of time, but forgetting can also be influenced by events that occur after meeting someone.
How do you fight distractions? Identify what must be remembered over the long term and help people's working memory keep that information alive by distinguishing it. Imagine you have a slideshow with a set of three ideas that people have to remember, displayed in three columns on the slideshow. Reserve the three-column design only for those takeaways. These different messages are then repeated multiple times to refresh people's working memory. New items overwrite old items in working memory approximately every 30 seconds. Therefore, consider including a lot of repetition to maintain strong working memory.
2. Combining materials to improve working memory
Suppose there are 12 components to important information you want others to remember. Instead of trying to get your audience to memorize 12 separate concepts, divide them into three or four parts. This gives listeners a higher chance of remembering certain items accurately.
This is useful because working memory is a form of cognitive workload. When you give people too many tasks, they will look elsewhere for something easier to handle. So present your content in a way that allows for chunking that caters to working memory.
You can "chunk" (create generic groups) or "chunk" (materialize). If you were introducing your company's data analytics solutions, you might create three generic groups, saying, "Our solutions include visual analytics, advanced analytics, and streaming analytics." More specifically, you might say, "We Solutions include dashboards, machine learning, and real-time analytics.” Deciding whether to divide up or down depends on whether your audience needs to see the bigger picture or discover deeper structure.
3. Connect new concepts with familiar ones
The scientific community is currently considering this working memory formula: attention + long-term memory = working memory. This equation assumes that if you have something in your head to solve a cognitive task, you have to pay attention to it and use your long-term memory.
So, you can offer your audience something new and hopefully help their working memory, using attention-grabbing techniques (e.g., bold colors, motion, size, and placement). Then, connect new items to concepts that people already have in their long-term memory.
Suppose you present a complex cloud infrastructure with multiple components. You gray out most of the components and show some in bright colors to grab people's attention. At the same time, you used an analogy to mention that other solutions on the market are like scaffolding - they take the audience to the next level, but not enough to build a foundation. Your solution can. This strategy automatically directs attention and draws on long-term memory (scaffolding, architecture, and foundational visual companions), leaving the listener's brain with sufficient resources to focus on other elements as well.
Comments