# Do Background Colors Have an Impact on Preferences and Catch the Attention of Users?
## 2 Related Work
Analyses of data on attention showed that brightness and saturation levels are more important than the hue component in attracting attention: they found that the most attention was attracted when using colors with maximum saturation and brightness. We took advantage of this fact in our study. The drawback of the approach was its form, where the participants were shown a color palette with 49 squares of seven colors with different saturation and brightness levels. Introducing such a large number of colors into the space made it difficult to evaluate, which was tied to noise in participant's results. In addition, the colors were analyzed independently of each other, without a final summary or ranking. Approaches to capture visual attention have been reported in various studies [15, 16], where an EEG signal was used for estimating visual attention; however, eye tracking systems are most often used for this task [17, 18, 19]. In [20], the authors indicated an eye tracking study as a reasonable method to investigate how visual attention behaves under particular complex stimuli and tasks. According to the study [21], overt attention is usually associated with eye movements, mostly related to gaze fixation and saccades. The first of the eye movements--saccadic--are rapid, ballistic movements that brings new objects of interest into the fovea. Saccades are said to be ballistic as, once one starts, it will not stop until the target location is reached. The second type of eye movements are fixations, which position the target object into the fovea. This allows the eyes to maximize their focus on the object. Saccades are related to so-called spatial attention, a mechanism that chooses the destination of each subsequent saccade. In other words, it can be used to select process information from different locations [22, 23, 24]. Allocating attention to a position in space results in faster and more accurate processing of luminance and form information in a region of space surrounding that location [23, 25, 26]. In addition to enhancing perceptual processing, attention may also be important in guiding \"action systems,\" such as reaching [27]. As shifts in attention can occur much faster than changes in eye position [28], spatial attention can be used during one fixation to choose the location for the following fixation. Despite the fact that the first attention takes place before fixation, attention is the mechanism that suggests where the sight should be allocated. In context of divided attention, the place where the observer allocates (or, rather, redirects) their sight is what we focus. The studies presented above have mainly analyzed the role of colors in relation to psychological meaning, accessibility, and preferences of colors; however, there is a lack of comparisons of different colors, in relation to their background, in the context of graphical components of user interfaces. Indicating those colors that attract the attention of users more than others could enhance the process of usability in GUI design. The research goal of this paper is, thus, finding such colors that have a greater visual power than other colors and catch the attention of users more strongly, regardless of the background. This means that they should be visible, despite the surrounding environment. The visualization of the considered problem is depicted in Figure 2.  
To achieve this goal, a perceptual experiment was developed, where user preferences, related to user-friendly, readable color compositions, were measured. At the same time, we measured the unconscious reactions of users related to their first impression, indicating the color composition that (from a displayed pair of images) draws the user's attention first.