How can communication designers understand the role of attention and change in visual design?
In everyday life, we often pay attention to multiple things at once, a phenomenon referred to as divided attention. For instance, a server serving to a table must use divided attention. They need to take down the order from table one and recall what the customer at table six wanted, all while carefully balancing the dishes of food they are holding. However, our capacity to divide our attention has its limitations. For example, watching a movie during a lecture is not the most productive.
While divided attention occasionally happens in our daily lives, selective attention is more important. Selective attention is the act of concentrating on some things while disregarding others. Why do we choose to pay attention to some things while ignoring others? The answer could be the fact that we focus on intriguing things. However, a more plausible explanation would be the evolutionary development of our visual system, which functions effectively when you selectively focus on specific items in your environment.
How can one achieve selective attention?
Eye movement is one method of selective attention—scanning a scene to direct the fovea at areas we want to examine more thoroughly. We can also pay attention to things that are not immediately in our field of view. For example, a basketball player can dribble down the court while paying attention to a player on the offside before throwing a dead-on pass without looking. We can also directly stare at something while not paying attention to it. You may have experienced this when reading a book: Despite moving your eyes around the page and "reading" the words, you suddenly realize that you have no idea what you just read.
What elements help focus our attention?
While studying a scene, there are places where the eyes pause to take in information about a scene/scenario, and these pauses are called fixations. Eye movements known as saccades are represented by the lines connecting the dots. About three fixations are made every second when a person is asked to observe a scene.
Where do we focus our attention on a scene? The answer to this question is complex because our looking behaviour depends on various elements, such as scene qualities and the observer's knowledge and objectives.
The term "stimulus salience" describes environmental features that stand out due to physical attributes like colour, brightness, contrast, or orientation. High stimulus salience regions stand out, such as a bold yellow "M" against a red background.
But not everything that attracts attention is bright or conspicuous. It's also crucial to consider cognitive factors. It has been determined that a variety of cognitively based aspects are critical in assessing where a person looks.
Where we look can be influenced by our understanding of the things frequently seen in particular situations and the things often found together inside a scene. Imagine being in a cricket stadium; a cricket fan would be able to gaze and follow the game seamlessly. However, if you are someone who is not familiar with the game of cricket, you will have difficulty deciding where to look in a stadium at a particular point. This is true for multiple situations where your attention can be directed through each scene using your understanding of where things are typically found in these scenarios.
Another aspect important while addressing the phenomenon of attention is learning from past experiences. Suppose a person is adept at making tea. In that case, they could automatically direct their attention to what is essential at that particular point, such as whether they have to focus on the stove or on adding more ingredients.
A variety of things affect how someone examines a situation. At first, salient features might catch someone's eye, but cognitive variables take on greater significance when the observer's understanding of the scene's meaning starts to influence where they fixate. What a person is doing within a scenario is even more significant than the scene itself—both making tea or operating a vehicle influence where we look.
