Preattentive processing refers to the human brain’s ability to rapidly detect specific visual features before conscious awareness. This study is split into two parts, with the purpose of the first being to evaluate the effectiveness of preattentive processing in identifying targets with features such as motion, color, and form within controlled 3D video game environments. To this end, participants were shown a series of game scenes, each containing a target object designed with one of these preattentive attributes and were tasked with identifying these objects within a 250-millisecond window, the upper threshold of a defined time frame for what can be considered as preattentive processing. The visual complexity of the scenes was kept consistent, ensuring a uniform look and feel. Results reveal that motion and color are highly effective in guiding attention, with participants achieving perfect accuracy. In contrast, form detection was notably less reliable, with greater variability in accuracy. These findings contribute to understanding how visual complexity and uniformity impact preattentive processing in digital environments, with practical implications for designing visual tasks, game environments, and interfaces that guide user attention more effectively.

The second part involved participants playing through a short game where they would walk through the world and interact with objects that used one of the preattentive features to stand out from the background. Following the completion of this game, participants would answer a questionnaire regarding how effective they found the attributes to be at conveying the objective of the game, as well as which attributes they preferred to be guided by in a setting such as this. Results reveal that color is preferred over motion, and going one step further the most preferred type of color target was a glowing blue crate, and the most preferred type of motion target was a crate that would float up and down. These findings contribute to linking the fields of preattentive processing and gaze in video games together.