Learners often experience information overload when viewing and listening to presentations on PowerPoint. Addressing this, researchers in Japan proposed a ‘cumulative presentation’ design, in which visual content is segmented, and each segment appears alongside the relevant verbal explanation. By analyzing learners’ test scores and eye movements, researchers found that compared to the traditional format, in which information appeared all at once, cumulative presentation directed learners’ attention to relevant information and improved learning.

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia Volume 16, Number 1 (2026) brings together scholarship, criticism, interviews, and cultural documentation across Asian and Philippine humanities. Its two research articles examine Chinese agrarian visual culture through the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and Hui Muslim marginalization in Huo Da’s Muslim Funeral, while its reviews cover Philippine and Pacific literature, Fernando Zialcita’s essays, visual culture, music, concerts, and contemporary exhibitions. The issue also features conversations on Southeast Asian writing, diaspora, translation, theatre, publishing, and the Philippines’ participation at the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair, offering a broad view of how history, identity, religion, language, and the arts circulate across Asia and the wider world.

Maize, or corn, is a major dietary staple in Maya communities past and present because of its reliability, potential for surplus and suitability as both food and fodder. It became so important to ancient Mesoamerican communities that it even became central to many of their religious beliefs, and arguably, they built their societies on it, yet maize has a major nutritional limitation.