The Neuroscience of PowerPoint TM

Many concepts have been published relevant to improving the design of PowerPoint TM (PP) presentations for didactic purposes, including the redundancy, modality, and signaling principles of multimedia learning. In this article, we review the recent neuroimaging findings that have emerged elucidating the neural structures involved in many of these concepts. First, we explore the research suggesting that the brain utilizes similar structures to process written text and oral speech leading to neural competition and impaired performance during dual linguistic text/audition tasks (redundancy principle). Next, we examine research that demonstrates that the brain processes visual images in a manner different from and parallel to oral speech leading to improved performance during dual nonlinguistic visual/audition tasks (modality principle). Finally, we look at how the brain responds to contextual and direct attention cues (signaling principle). We link this research to PP design and suggest a number of concrete ways to implement these findings to improve the didactic strength of slide‐show presentations.