Abstract
The phenomenon of banner blindness is the ignorance of advertising banners and interface objects similar to them. Benway found that about 80% of users do not notice banner ads on websites (Benway, 1998). Several possible mechanisms are considered for the banner blindness occurrence. The type of information, user experience and attention inertia affect the distribution of attention and therefore banner blindness. Our study examined the effect of emotional valency and arousal on banner memorization and recognition. Participants' task was to search for a special link on an unfamiliar website. Images from the OASIS database were used as the banners (Kurdi et.al., 2016). They were selected based on their valency and arousal. There were 3 levels of valency (positive, negative and neutral) and 2 levels of arousal (high and low). Participants were asked to find the necessary link on the website as soon as possible. Participants were not informed about the presence of banners on the website. After participants completed the task, the link they found transferred them to a questionnaire, which included the questions about the presence and the contents of banners and a recognition task. Multinomial logistic regression tested the effects of emotional valency and arousal on banner recognition and memorization. Valency had a significant effect on banner recognition, but not on banner memorization. No main effect of arousal was found for banner memorization and recognition. Participants recognized banners with neutral valency better than negative and positive ones. Banners with negative valency were recognized worse than positive. We assumed that user experience had an influence on banner blindness. Previous experience helped users to understand that emotionally images in certain parts of the website usually carry useless information. It can also be concluded that both physical and affective features of the images influence the occurrence of the banner blindness.