Laws of Perception · cognitive-bias
Selective Attention
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People attend only to what seems relevant to their goal and filter out the rest — famously ignoring anything shaped like an ad (banner blindness). Where you put a message matters more than how loud it is.
Where it comes from
Colin Cherry's 1953 "cocktail party" experiments had people repeat one voice piped into one ear while a second voice filled the other — listeners couldn't even say what language the ignored ear spoke. Attention is a spotlight, not a floodlight. Benway and Lane named "banner blindness" in 1998 after watching users miss huge, colourful web banners containing the very answer they were hunting for.
Origin: Cherry's 1953 cocktail-party experiments
In the wild
- Banner blindness
Users scroll straight past image strips at the top of content pages — even when the "banner" is a feature they asked for.
- Inline validation
An error summary at the top of a long form gets missed; the message next to the failing field gets seen.
- Cockpit-style dashboards
Alert placement inside the user's scan path beats a bigger, redder alert outside it.
Further reading
Don't just read it — feel it.
Play the 3-minute game and let your own reactions prove the law.
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