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There are many articles which discuss about color theory, psychology and how color affects mood and emotions. This article is slightly different. It is an exploration of color from the aspect of preattentive attributes. There are different preattentive attributes which I have previously discussed in this article and color is one of the important attributes.
“A preattentive visual property is one which is processed in spatial memory without our conscious action. In essence it takes less than 500 milliseconds for the eye and the brain to process a preattentive property “ — IDF
Our brain is very efficient is processing these properties and it requires no conscious effort from us. Colin Ware speaks about 4 categories in his book “Information Visualization: Perception for Design”
- Color
- Form
- Motion
- Spatial Position
Color is one among the many visual attributes of the object and forms a good adjective. Blue Sea, Red Rose, Green Apple, Brown Belt etc. Color helps in quick differentiation between various objects of similar attributes.
Strong Preattentive Property
Search for the occurrence of 2 in the above image. It takes a considerable amount of time to sift through all the numbers to find 2. Without seeing the next image can you find out how many 2s are there and just check the time taken too.
If we add color as the property to number 2 let’s see what happens
