In Media we are competing for EYES - online, offline, newspaper, magazine, billboards. It is all about gaining and retaining Attention.

I loved my cognitive psychology papers, the understanding the unconscious processes involved in everyday life that the vast majority of people are completely unaware of.

On the media front this is so important though, we are going for EYES and ATTENTION - we are wanting to grasp peoples cognitive processes and take control of them for a period of time.

Some interesting points:

Cognitive processes have to time-slice between receiving information, processing it and remembering it.

Attention gets distracted by input on different channels, especially dynamic media (visual dominance).

We only remember a fraction of content from dynamic media (speech, video): gist memory.

Comprehension in text/speech is linear: follows input; but not so in image:depends on motivation, user’s goal, knowledge of the domain and media design.

Thematic congruence: different parts of the message should be easy to integrate and comprehend.

Truth be told though we as mere mortals with our eyes and attention may soon be irrelevant anyway… Read here Human made redundant as…