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Designing with your brain in mind — Using Pre-attentive Attributes
(You can also find the article on my website together with other articles and more interesting things)
What are Pre-attentive Attributes?
Pre-attentive attributes are attributes that our brain, or more exactly our Spatial Memory, subconsciously processes when looking at a visual. It is the very first thing that you pay attention to. The process is done in milliseconds, before you are even aware of it.
If you have you read any of Daniel Kahnemans books, he splits up the brain in two systems.
- System 1 (Reptilian brain): This system is quick, automatic, impulsive, unconscious, emotional and stereotypical.
- System 2: This system is slower, conscious, reflective, analytical and makes complex decisions
Both of these systems are necessary for our survival and have being evolved during a really long time. We as humans does not have the capacity to use System 2 for everything we see, it would drain too much energy. Therefore we need the reptilian brain to make a lot of decisions for us in our daily life.
The pre-attentive attributes are linked to the reptilian brain. In a laymen eyes one can define the pre-attentive attributes as where your eyes are drawn first when looking at a visual. What we automatically think of a visual the first milliseconds it appears in front of us.
By knowing about these pre-attentive attributes, one can in a way control where the audience first will draw the eyes to when looking at your visual.
You can use these pre-attentive attributes to highlight what is of the most importance of your visualization. It is possible for you to tell which story you want the audience to read, where they subconsciously will draw their attention before really looking at the visualization itself.
It is one of the most important parts in the design, to get the audience to understand what you want to tell them. The importance of being able to “control the narrative” has a myriad of use-cases, present…
