So I am a perception researcher. There is research on a lot of tactics for advertising.

There are laws now, shaped by that research, that prevent advertisers from using specific symbols used to mark materials and locations for safety. For instance.

The symbol for radiation is not allowed on advertising.

Do you know why?

Maybe you have a pretty good idea.

The symbol will lose not only its meaning when applied to non radiation areas. But it loses salience.

Salience is how attention-grabbing something is. There are specific features of things in the world that our perpetual system was designed to notice more. Because these are important to us in some functional way. They help us navigate our environment.

Bright colors. High contrast. Unusual Geometrics. And movement.

Another important thing about the perception system is it’s adaptiveness. Highly adaptive. Even at older ages.

But very very adaptive at young ages.

An example. Kittens raised in spaces with only vertical black and white lines and never allowed to see any other orientation or color. (Blindfolded when fed and most of the time). When these cats were put in a room with horizontal lines. They could not “see” them. And ran into the walls. They never regained their ability to see horizontal lines nor any other orientation since this loss happened since birth.

This is because specific neurons in your primary cortex respond to specific orientations. If they never fire from lack of stimuli. They die.

Now that’s an extreme version. But what I trying to get at is this:

The sensory system is highly adaptive to the environment. It provides what the person needs.

When we are bombarded with adds that all use salient stimuli (bold colors, moving, high contrast), we start tunning these out. They become “low salient”.

Why is this a problem. ?

Because the brain processing at early sensory attention cannot “tell the difference” between a billboard advertising video playing in your periphery trying to grab your attention. And a small child running in the periphery that will end up in front of your car.

We are “learning” to not see movement. Or at least not direct our attention to it to identify what it is.

We are learning to not see bold colors and high contrast.

Things that we actually do need to see most of time. People are still missing safety and warning signs all the time because advertisements try to grab our attention and we learned to ignore anything bold.

This is not speculation. Lots of research on this. Being constantly surrounded by advertisement changes salience of important visual and audio cues.

It also has cognitive effects like exhaustion.

But I’m not as versed on those as the perception parts. That’s my area of expertise.

I say, we as scientist must prove ads are harming us. Get legislation passed to protect people and kids.

But there already is evidence. And nothing is done.

No one cares. No one can fight lobbyists.

And it’s hard to quantify the damage. Like specifically risk increases and the like.

Very difficult to do.

No control subjects.

So the research is often dismissed as speculation on real world applied harm.

There are some laws in some places. But not enough.