The Power of Legal Video
People Retain Stories from Videos
“Something is happening. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, an understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by reading images.” (Paul Martin Lester, Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication)
Studies show that people retain 10 percent of what they hear, 20 percent of what they read and 80 percent of what they see and do – and, because people become physically and emotionally engaged with the moving images, compelling evidence presented in video form continues to resonate with people (including judges and juries if you reach that point!) much more effectively than evidence that is spoken or presented in text form.
A University of Iowa study showed that auditory memory is not as powerful as memories of sounds, images and objects. And, the more that time elapses, the more auditory memory lags behind other kinds. Conversely, MIT and Harvard researchers discovered that, if something can go into “visual long-term memory,” it may not be wiped out from memory at all.
