How Psychology can Improve Advertising Visual Appeal

Our eyes are subject to change blindness

Try to closely compare these two pictures :

After focusing on them for a certain time, you may have noticed some important differences between the two. You may have also been surprised by the efforts you need to detect such big differences.

Well, that’s what psychologists call “change blindness”. It shows how our eyes do not fix the whole of an object, but by their constant oscillation find only what they are looking for.

According to Donald Hoffman in The Case Against Reality, your eyes only see what interests them from an evolutionary perspective. The world you perceive is limited to the interface of your human perception, which is only sensitive to certain types of visual cues (food, human faces, living things…).

As such, this has big consequences on how marketers can attract attention with branded visuals. Customers don’t necessarily see what the marketers want them to see in their visual ads.

Here are 4 experiments that explain how you can use perceptual biases to effectively draw the right…