Peripheral vision is also known as Side vision. It is the ability to see objects and movement outside of the direct line of vision. Peripheral vision gives you the ability to pay attention to something even if your front vision is focus on something else. This kind of vision gives consumers the capacity to process information even if they are not aware that they are doing so, this process is called preattentive processing.When preattentive processing is occurring, the consumers’ subconscious processes the stimuli in peripheral vision. Although the consumer is limiting the attention to what he or she is looking at, his subconscious is processing the information that his peripheral vision is seeing.
There are two main factors that impact our ability to process information by preattentive processing. The first one is whether the stimulus in peripheral vision is a picture or a word and the second one is whether it is placed on the right or left side of the object we are observing. These two factors are important because the brain has two hemispheres that process the information.The right hemisphere of the brain is best at processing holistic information such as music, pictures and spatial information. The left hemisphere of the brain is better at processing units such as counting, forming sentences, and words.
With the right hemisphere of our brain we form inferences and draw conclusions, while with the left side we can process units that can be combined.The stimuli that is placed on the right side of focal article is processed by our left hemisphere while the stimuli that is placed on the left side of the focal field is processed by our right hemisphere. This means that if a marketer wants to get the attention of our subconscious he should place ads with pictures to the left of our visual field and ads with sentences to the right of our visual field.To take full advantage of this, and make a brand name familiar through preattentive process, the marketer should place stimuli such as pictures ads to the left of the magazine article because the processing takes place on the right hemisphere.
Also stimuli that contain brand names or slogans should be placed on the right side of the article so the left hemisphere can process it. By doing this the consumer will be able to preattentively process the ads.
