Using Occluded Text as a Cue Attracting Visual Attention and Preference in Packaging and Advertising

Abstract

This study uses occluded text as a visual cue and hypothesizes that a deliberately incomplete advertisement headline or product name enhances visual attention. An experiment on tea packaging and advertisement is applied to investigate whether visual attention and, even viewer preference enhancement, will be affected by occluded text. The experiment contains two parts: first, an eye tracker observes the differences in the participant’s visual attention between samples of incomplete and complete text; second, a questionnaire records the participants’ preferences between the two samples. The result validates our hypothesis that incomplete text elicits a certain level of visual attention as long as viewers can recognize the text; alternatively, if the occlusion causes difficulty in text recognition, the occluded text will fail to attract visual attention and viewer preference. This is particularly true for advertisement headlines. The experiment results of visual attention and viewer preference for the occluded product name on tea packaging are consistent. As for the occluded advertisement headline, however, it attracts only visual attention but is not able to enhance viewer preference. This could be attributed to the fact that participants are affected by different amounts of received information and their complexities when examining experiment samples.