There is a brief but excellent article by Michael Leveridge at the Canadian Urologic Association Journal for April 2025 (Volume 19, Number 4, pages 78 and 79) titled This is a busy slide: Fix your presentations this year. He has the following advice:
Cognitive Load
“Your presentation imparts a ‘load’ on the audience member. All of the information piles into working memory for processing, and only if connections are made will schemata form and encode into long-term memory.
The intrinsic load is the complexity or difficulty of the material. It varies between recipients, as those already expert can process complex concepts more easily than novices. There’s not much you can do in the moment to change the complexity or the audience’s knowledge base, but you can think ahead about each.
The extrinsic load is everything about the speech and visuals that is not relevant to understanding the material. It is the mental effort required in deciphering redundant text, linking words and visuals, or parsing dense graphics: a marginally relevant image, the static of hearing words being read as you try to read them, irrelevant lines on that table, the back-and-forth to align the figure legend with the curves. These fall under the research-backed principles like coherence, redundancy, and spatial contiguity, and these names suggest the solutions (Ref. 2).
Cut the superfluous text and visuals, even if interesting. Signal to the relevant points on the tables and visuals. Bring like elements together on the slide to decrease the work of linking them. Graphic design principles – alignment, repetition and proximity – are the tools of facilitating understanding by removing clutter. Again, a sweep to declutter and intentionally arrange your slide deck is a quick and powerful thing.”
My cartoon was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.
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