FOCUS!
 Unfortunately for
advertisers, we have a lot of stimuli in our
modern environment, especially the kind that
assaults our eyes. Mental and physical resources
are limited, and our brains must decide in an
instant which stimulus is the most
important to attend to. This is called selection
for action. For primitive man, the
question was, "Where
is it?" He heard a rustling in the
bushes, saw a twig move. His mind attended to the task of
determining where "it" might have been
so that his body and senses could focus on a
target for potential action.
This very low level of engagement isn’t just
something that keeps us out of the way of danger
or attracts us to food. When we read and reach
the end of a line of text, our brains prepare our
eyes to move quickly to the left to search for
the rest of a sentence. When it comes to
engagement, if your brain chooses to attend to a stimulus
that it deems significant, you are engaged.
Selection
for action is
part of our personal lives too. Our emotions
can be triggered
by a glance, a sigh, or a kind word. If
you look at someone there may be some
particular feature about them that
attracts you -- his hair, her figure, the
cut of someone’s clothes. Or perhaps
you overhear another person in
conversation and they say something
interesting, something that intrigues you
– even there selection
for action
occurs.
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To date, the exploitation of
this in computer applications has been limited to
changes in highlighting or flashing words and
icons. Even so, when used properly this kind of
attention capturing has proved useful to users.
In interface design there is a technical term for
changing certain colors in the borders of desktop
windows, depending on their active or non-active
status. It is called giving "focus" to a particular
window, and it helps computer users keep track of
what can be acted upon.
There are limitations to the
exploitation of this low level mental process,
and these limitations are shared with another
human perceptual trait.
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