Exposition

Mind Wandering During Lectures (2025)

Magda Stanová
open exposition

About this exposition

Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said. In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly. At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsmind wandering, attention, presentation formats, lecture, panel discussion, conference, PowerPoint
date03/09/2025
published21/11/2025
last modified21/11/2025
statuspublished
affiliationAcademy of Fine Arts in Prague
copyrightMagda Stanová
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3847167/3847168
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/rc.3847167
published inResearch Catalogue


Copyrights

namevideo-1_edited.mp4
copyrightMagda Stanová
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
usagesvideo
namepreview_image.png
copyrightDaniele Pozzi
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
usagesimage
namefigure-1a
copyrightMagda Stanová
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namefigure-2a
copyrightMagda Stanová
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture

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