Seductive details

Seductive details are often used in textbooks, lectures, slideshows, and other forms of educational content to make a course more interesting or interactive. Seductive details can take the form of text, photos, illustrations, sounds or music and are by definition: (1) interesting and (2) not directed toward the learning objectives of a lesson.John Dewey, in 1913, first referred to this as “fictitious inducements to attention.” While illustrated text can enhance comprehension, illustrations that are not relevant can lead to poor learning outcomes. Since the late 1980s, many studies in the field of educational psychology have shown that the addition of seductive details results in poorer retention of information and transfer of learning. Thalheimer conducted a meta-analysis that found, overall, a negative impact for the inclusion of seductive details such as text, photos or illustrations, and sounds or music in learning content. This reduction to learning is called the seductive details effect. Recently, there have been many criticisms of this theory. Critics cite unconvincing and contradictory evidence to argue that seductive details do not always impede understanding and that seductive details can sometimes be motivating for learners.

Most studies are conducted through experiments that compare the learning results between two scenarios: an explanation with seductive details and an explanation with no seductive details. The explanation format can vary in form from text-based, video, web-based or presentation style. The seductive details in these experiments varies from extraneous details to irrelevant images or irrelevant video. Learning outcomes of participants are determined through a variety of tests that include both recall abilities and problem-solving abilities. This is known as transfer performance.

Early research showed that adding seductive details did not have the intended effect of improving learning; instead the seductive details tended to be detrimental to the learner's recall. Adding interesting but unimportant sentences to expository texts hindered the learning of the main points of the text and learners would remember the seductive details better than the main text.

An example of a seductive detail in a training context might be a training class that includes cartoons on slides containing tips for effective supervision. Although not necessarily relevant to the topic, the cartoons are designed to make the training material more interesting, but the results of multiple studies suggest that their inclusion will harm recall from the primary training content.

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