Guidelines for Poster Presentations

A poster should allow the viewer to get the main points of your study. It must contain enough information so that viewers can understand it without any additional explanation, but it must also be brief enough so that casual viewers can get the “take-home message” from just a brief examination.

At conferences, posters are generally allotted a space about 4 feet (high) by 8 feet (wide). For your class project, you should aim for about 4x4 to 4x6 instead. The poster should begin with a title on the upper left, and end with conclusions on the lower right. In between, you should give a description of the design, methods, and results of your study. This could be done in a number of ways: Separate pages printed out for Method and Results, along with separate pages displaying sample stimuli and graphical representations of the results is one possibility. Another would be to simply include additional descriptions of the method in smaller type at the bottom of the page that displays the stimuli or design, and include verbal descriptions of the results in small type at the bottom of the pages that display the graphs of the results. Remember that a poster is designed to give the main message of a study to viewers who may be several feet away and may only look at the poster for a few minutes. For this reason, your main points should be in large enough type to be easily read from across the room, and your results should be displayed one or more graphs if possible rather than just in a table.

Unless you have access to a special printer that can print on poster board or wide sheets of paper, you will probably construct your poster from individual 8x11 sheets of printed paper. A good method is to create a power-point presentation and print out the individual slides for the poster. The panels (individual pages) can then be affixed to poster board for display. It is strongly recommended (but not required) that you affix your panels to one or two sheets of poster board to make it easier to display and more professional-looking. If you do plan to simply display individual panels, you should plan on arriving early before class to put them up.

In a poster session at a conference, presenters generally simply stand by their poster and field questions. For your presentation in this class, you will display the poster and give a brief (no more than 5 minutes) description of your hypothesis, method, and results. This should be brief – what was the question you were trying to answer, what did you manipulate and what did you measure, what result did you predict, what were the results, and did they confirm the prediction. Leave out all unnecessary details and background or literature review.

Please see my home page for one or more examples of posters I have presented at various conferences. They may help you get ideas for how to present your poster.