Seductive details are interesting but instructionally irrelevant material, text, animations, photographs, illustrations, sounds or music, added to textbooks, lectures, slideshows and other educational content to make it feel more interesting or engaging. The phenomenon was first named by John Dewey in 1913, who called such additions fictitious inducements to attention. Research since the late 1980s has generally found that adding seductive details reduces both retention of information and transfer of learning, an effect commonly called the seductive details effect, though the finding remains contested among some researchers.
Facts
Core ClaimSeductive details are interesting but instructionally irrelevant material, such as text, animations, photos, illustrations, sounds or music, added to textbooks, lectures, slideshows and other educational content to make it feel more interesting or engaging; studies since the late 1980s have generally found that adding them reduces both retention of information and transfer of learning. 2 Classification
Education Level FAQs
Why do seductive details make it harder to learn?
It adds extraneous cognitive load that distracts from building a coherent understanding of the lesson.
Researchers explain the effect mainly through cognitive load. Interesting but irrelevant material pulls limited mental resources toward processing things that distract from, or disrupt, building a coherent mental model of the lesson. Learners with low working memory capacity seem especially vulnerable: in one eye-tracking study they looked at the seductive illustrations more often and for longer than learners with high working memory capacity. Placement also matters. A 1998 study by Harp and Mayer found that seductive details at the beginning of a lesson hindered performance particularly, while details put at the end left performance similar to that of students who had none.
Connections
Developed By
Source Wikipedia: Seductive Details
Sources
1. Seductive details (Wikipedia)
often used in textbooks, lectures, slideshows, and other forms of educational contentView the Source 2. Wikipedia: Seductive Details
Wikimedia FoundationWikipedia lead section, sentence naming Dewey's 1913 coinage
John Dewey, in 1913, first referred to this as "fictitious inducements to attention".
Developed By: John Dewey, Lead
John Dewey, in 1913, first referred to this as "fictitious inducements to attention".
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