How we process visual information in a world of rapidly changing media has become a concern for many industries, particularly advertising. How the eye perceives images and sends them to the brain is the focus of Andrew Herbert's research. Herbert is associate professor and chair of the psychology department at RIT.

"We're trying to understand what we pay attention to when we look at certain images, and what makes us stop paying attention," he says. "How much does eye contact really matter in our perception of things?"

Human eyes move 150,000 to 180,000 times a day, Herbert says, and most of the time we are unaware of it. Using an eye tracking device, Herbert's team was able to measure eye movement.

Herbert showed volunteers high resolution black-and-white images of moving human eyes. The research confirmed that human sight is naturally attracted to movement. When written words were added to the images, the volunteers unconsciously blocked out the copy and focused only on the movement. They never remembered seeing words.

"If you have a moving picture, do you read the text or do you look somewhere else?" Herbert says. "The research shows that if you're an advertiser with a message that you want to get across, you'll want to convey it in the movement. People will not read the copy."

If an advertiser wants consumers to read copy, Herbert says, don't pair the copy with moving images.

"Maybe newspapers and magazines had it right," he says.

While researchers are learning more about how the eyes send information to the brain, they are no closer to understanding why the eyes block out the copy, Herbert says.

Herbert's research was funded by Kodak and New York State, and it was conducted in collaboration with students and faculty from RIT's Carlson Center for Imaging Science.