When viewing a sequence of slide, the audience primarily will encode what they see, and if they fail to encode material, it may as well not even exist. The follow three principles cover encoding processes in this context: Discriminability, Perceptual Organization, and Salience.

Encoding Processes

After visual patterns are encoded, they need to be integrated. In a typical presentation, material needs to be integrated in working memory over the course of multiple slides. The integration process is a prelude to completely comprehending both individual displays and the whole presentation. The following two principles fall under working memory: Limited Capacity and Informative Change.

Working Memory

Task analysis leads us to posit a third class of relevant processes. Encoding information and integrating it appropriately wouldn’t be useful if the meaning of the material wasn’t understood. In order to create meaning from the stimuli, it must be compared to previously stored information in the long-term memory. Through retrieval, we can comprehend the imported information. The follow three principles address accessing long-term memory, and relevant stored information: Appropriate Knowledge, Compatibility, and Relevance.

Accessing Long-Term Memory

There are eight elements in a quality PowerPoint presentation, and these elements are key in making sure that the presentation is worthwhile and will maintain the attention of the people watching the presentation. These elements are broken up into 3 broader categories: Encoding Processes, Working Memory, and Accessing Long-Term Memory.

Ohio State University, Columbus

A presentation supplement by, or based on, a set of photographic slides and/or projected images. They typically presented in a pre-determined order, meant to educate viewer on some concept.

PowerPoint/Slideshow Presentations 

Kosslyn, S. M., Kievit, R. A., Russell, A. G., & Shephard, J. M. (2012, July 17). PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and failures: A psychological analysis. Frontiers. Retrieved September 22, 2022, from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00230/full 

PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis

These presentations are used in practically any setting, ranging from academia (from K-12 schooling, and post-secondary schooling), business, government, and the military.

Where PowerPoints are Used

Research has found that students learned more subject material from PowerPoint presentations, than from chapter summaries, yet similar research found no noticeable distinction between PowerPoint presentations and other forms of media (such as overhead projectors, and blackboards). Other research has actually found that PowerPoints impair learning, and that student recalled more verbal information from a traditional lecture than they did when information was presented used a PowerPoint-based lecture.

Inconsistent Results Regarding PowerPoints

Principles of a Quality PowerPoint

An analysis of PowerPoint presentations was done through a recent experiment, which was broken up into three focus areas: 
Study 1: The frequency of which certain principles are broken.
Study 2: What participants found to be inefficient in the PowerPoint presentations they’ve encountered in the last year.
Study 3: The ability or inability for participants to recognize which principles were being violated on certain slides.
Then, participants were shown slides that violated principles, and asked to point out the violated principle, and define which principle was violated. This description was centered on the first and third focus areas. The second focus area was experimented on by asking participants what problems that they encountered with PowerPoints they had seen in the last year. 

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