The TED Talk that I analyze is “The Hidden history found in your teeth” by Carolyn Freiwald. The video takes into account the redundancy principle which states that people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration and printed text. This principle was widely applied in the video where Freiwald used images to explain the concept of immigration. The pictures depicted immigrants, particularly from Africa and South America crossing the border to gain entry into the United States. This principle is in line with the Dual Coding Theory. The theory explains that humans take in information through the eyes and ears. The ears take in auditory stimuli and the eyes take in images. The theory further explains that the human brain has two short term memory channels for auditory and visual stimuli. The visual short term channel takes in both images and texts; therefore, mixing printed texts and graphics overwhelms the short term visual channel. Herein, Freiwaild uses only narration and graphics throughout the talk to reduce extraneous processing.
This TED Talk further obeys the modality principle which states that people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics and texts (Mayer, 2014). From the beginning of the talk, the author was brought a human skeleton which she used throughout the talk to explain the hidden history of the teeth. Freiwald further used diagrams of the human tooth to explain the differences in the teeth of people of different races. The use of images and narration herein manage essential processing. Narrations are usually preferred to printed text. Based on Dual Coding theory images and narration are taken in through the visual and auditory channel; this TED Talk allows the brain to make a connection between the sounds it is hearing and the images it is being fed.
Reference
Mayer, R. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139547369