Exposition

Mind Wandering During Lectures (2025)

Magda Stanová

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


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