Unseen and Unaware: Implications of Recent Research on Failures of Visual Awareness for Human-Computer Interface Design

Because computers often rely on visual displays as a way to convey information to a user, recent research suggesting that people have detailed awareness of only a small subset of the visual environment has important implications for human-computer interface design. Equally important to basic limits of awareness is the fact that people often over-predict what they will see and become aware of. Together, basic failures of awareness and people's failure to intuitively understand them may account for situations where computer users fail to obtain critical information from a display even when the designer intended to make the information highly visible and easy to apprehend. To minimize the deleterious effects of failures of awareness, it is important for users and especially designers to be mindful of the circumscribed nature of visual awareness. In this article, we review basic and applied research documenting failures of visual awareness and the related metacognitive failure and then discuss misplaced beliefs that could accentuate both in the context of the human-computer interface.