Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Aids to Audience Decision Making 157

When she spoke using an unexpressive style, she made little eye contact, no hand or head gestures,

few facial expressions, and spoke in a monotone voice.^119

Undergraduates who watched the expressive nonverbal delivery reported they tried harder to

attend to the speaker’s arguments than students who watched the unexpressive delivery. In addition,

the undergraduates who watched the expressive nonverbal delivery were better able to discriminate

the strong arguments she made from the weak ones.

Relevant Images

Audience members are more likely to attend to and prefer documents and slide presentations that

include relevant images and graphic elements in addition to text.^120 If documents or slide presenta-

tions contain no visually appealing images or graphics, some audience members may not attend to

them at all.^121

In a large-scale study of consumers’ attention to ads, 300 adults were exposed to a total of

1,070 magazine ads. Consumers paid more attention to ads that had more photos and fewer

words.^122 Other studies report similar findings. When online search results include images of

the products consumers search for, consumers evaluate more products, review each product

more carefully, and pay more attention to the accompanying text.^123 When cigarette warn-

ing labels include a graphic image of the health-related risks of smoking, consumers nearly

triple the viewing time they would otherwise give the warnings.^124 Graphic images increase

consumers’ recall of warnings as well.^125

Although any image is likely to be attention getting, some images are more attention getting

than others. For example, viewers pay more attention to color than to black-and-white pho-

tographs and also rate color photographs as more attractive and recall more information from

them.^126 Charts and graphs that effectively use contrast and color are also more attention getting

than those that do not.^127

Despite their many benefi ts, images must be chosen with some discretion. Clip art and other

embellishments to slide presentations can actually reduce viewers’ comprehension.^128 Merely

decorative images in documents or slide presentations distract readers and viewers from the con-

tent,^129 and unlike relevant images, impair their memory for the important messages.^130 Vivid

images aid message recall only when they are congruent with the message content. When vivid

but incongruent images are added to a message, the audience’s attention to the message is sub-

stantially reduced.^131

Audience members may purposefully ignore otherwise attention-getting images when per-

forming some tasks. For many tasks that computer users have to perform, the attention-getting

quality of graphic elements on the screen does not predict their eye fi xations.^132 For example, when

job seekers search company websites for relevant information, they tend to focus less on the sites’

graphic images and more on the site’s text and hyperlinks.^133 Experts in a domain, as well as novices

with a high initial interest in a domain, are especially likely to ignore images and to fi nd them both

distracting and redundant.^134

Aids to viewers’ attention to other people are treated separately in Chapter 6. Emotionally

charged images that attract viewers’ attention are explored in Chapter 7.

Aids to Sentence-Level Comprehension

Comprehension as defi ned in this section refers to the audience’s comprehension of individual sen-

tences as opposed to their comprehension of discourse—groups of sentences in paragraphs, whole

documents, or presentations. Discourse comprehension depends on schema activation, the topic of