One of the problems with the 1986 UM/3M study was that it used overhead transparencies and slides for visual support. It is a little hard to know which of the 1986 findings (if any) might be generalized to the way most presentations are given today. It might be reasonable to think that the positive findings in comprehension and retention would still hold true. What about the significant improvement in the audience’s perception of the speaker however? Vogel hypothesized that the improvement in persuasion was predominately mediated through this heightened positive perception of the speaker. Would someone viewing a typical presentation with PowerPoint visuals today perceive the presenter as positively as the 1986 subjects viewed the speaker with overhead transparencies?

In 1996, Doug Vogel, who was an associate professor in the MIS department at the University of Arizona at the time, joined forces with Joline Morrison, an assistant professor in the MIS department at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, to submit a research paper for publication entitled “The Impacts of Presentation Visuals on Persuasion”. After a revision in 1997, the article was accepted and published in a 1998 volume of Information & Management.

This article did two things. First, it re-presented the data from Vogel’s 1986 research, and secondly, it added new results from an interesting 2nd study on the use of electronic presentation of computer visuals rather than the overheads and slides he had used previously. The 1986 study was covered in the posts linked above, so this entry will only be concerned with the 1996 extension.

The purpose of this extension study was to “investigate the impact of screen-show effects (animation and transitions) on presentation persuasiveness.” Vogel saw animation and transitions as another characteristic of visuals just like colour vs. B&W or text only vs. the incorporation of graphics. Prior to conducting this extension study, Vogel hypothesized that the use of animations and transitions would enhance attention as well as the audience’s perception of the presenter. Both of these were expected to have positive effects on persuasion.

Study Design
The design of this study was almost identical to the original research. Presentation content, context and speaker were the same. His subjects were 67 senior-level undergrad business students, so the audience was essentially the same. The presentation visuals however, were altered. New visuals were created using a software that supported animation and transitions (the article does not specify which software). Animations were added like the following:

• Bar/Line/Pie Charts - Animation was used to make these charts appear to ‘grow’ dynamically.
• Image-enhanced charts - Animation was used to add interest to charts containing clip art.
• Bullet charts - Animation was used to make bullet items build on the visual as the speaker made new points.

In addition, a variety of transition effects were used in between visuals. Wipes, fades, blinds and other effects were apparently used in a way “the researchers felt was attractive”.
Subjects were then randomly assigned to one of the following “treatment” groups:

• No visuals
• Screen show visuals with no effects
• Transitions-only
• Animation-only
• Combined animation/transitions

Results
In the 1986 study, there was a strong improvement in the perception of the presenter when visuals were used. Ten years later, this study showed no difference in the audience’s perception of the presenter when visuals were used. Comprehension was stronger when visuals were used however. When it comes to animations and transitions, Vogel found some interesting results.

1) In terms of attention (first step in the persuasion process), a numerical improvement was seen only when animations were used in combination with transitions. Vogel doesn’t provide a p-value, but it doesn’t look like the numerical difference was statistically significant.
2) For attention and yielding (getting agreement), using transitions alone was always worse than using no visuals at all.
3) For comprehension, all groups did better than the no-visuals group, with the animation-only group doing the best overall.
4) Perceptions of the speaker were highest across the board for the combined animations/transitions group, and the difference was especially significant for the following components of speaker perceptions: preparedness, professionalism, clarity, strength and quality of support data.
5) In this study, the idea that enhanced perceptions of the speaker serve to enhance the persuasiveness of the presentation was not proven.

Discussion
When thinking about the use or non-use of presentation visuals, what changed between 1986 and 1996? In 1986, visuals made a big difference in how a speaker was perceived by college seniors. By 1996 there was little to no difference at al. Had the quality, speed and intensity of video (especially TV) made these presentations unimpressive? One of Vogel’s 1986 findings showed that bad visuals can actually hurt the effectiveness of a good speaker. Did the presentation and visuals which had been only slightly updated seem old and out of date? It is hard to tell for sure, but something certainly did change.

The animations that were included sound like the typical animations that might be used by an amateur developing presentation support today. Although Vogel is not specific, it sounds like the selection of transitions used were random. Based on this study, I think we can clearly say that poor selections of transitions can diminish the effectiveness of a presentation so much that the speaker would have been better off not using visuals at all. In this case, the audience might not have liked the variety of transitions from visual to visual which may have seemed random and purposeless.

We can also say that even simple animations can help comprehension, but since Vogel did not add the follow up retention piece to this extension study, we don’t know if there is a difference in the long term retention of that information.

Unfortunately, based on the results of this study, we cannot say that any of this ultimately and positively leads to improved persuasion followed by action, because that simply was not demonstrated.