Why should advertisers include images in adverts if they are not noticed?
The average layperson without any knowledge of psychology reasonably assumes that their responses only occur when information is noticed. Whilst this assumption is largely true, when we are paying conscious attention to the world around us, it does not hold when we are not paying conscious attention. A few simple examples make this clear. Everyone, car drivers in particular, can recall periods when they have travelled considerable distances from A to B without any recall of the period in between. Effectively, we have operated on autopilot. Using unconscious, automatic, decision making in response to environmental cues drivers function quite effectively but they often have no conscious awareness of what occurred or what controlled their behaviour. Again, when we speak, we normally do not have control over the grammatical structure of our statements. If we attempted to maintain conscious control over our speech it would be very slow and halting. Instead we rely on automatic, over learned
