# Visual Perception of Peripheral Screen Elements: The Impact of Text and Background Colors
## 4 Conclusions
The measurements also analyzed movement directions, with stimuli moving in eight directions. Stimuli moving in the same direction on opposite sides of the screen had approximately equal perception times, which is important for designing graphical user interfaces as it suggests equal importance for all peripheral screen areas. Our results expand upon previous findings on color contrast and peripheral perception [9; 16; 25] by incorporating dynamic text stimuli and simulating real-time GUI interactions. In contrast to static-font readability studies [2; 5; 15], our design reflects more naturalistic attentional shifts during digital tasks. These insights complement and extend prior research on the role of peripheral vision in user interfaces [23; 27; 28], offering additional evidence for optimizing design choices based on contrast, motion, and spatial layout. This study highlights important considerations for interface designers seeking to optimize visual alert effectiveness. Specifically, high-contrast color combinations can enhance peripheral detection but should be used cautiously to avoid visual fatigue or distraction. We recommend applying these techniques primarily in contexts where immediate attention is critical, such as notification banners and safety-critical dashboards. By strategically leveraging contrast, designers can improve user responsiveness without compromising overall interface usability. Future design efforts should balance alert visibility with aesthetic and ergonomic factors to maximize both effectiveness and user comfort. Future research should build on these findings by exploring differences in visual alert effectiveness across device types, such as mobile versus desktop interfaces, to better understand contextual influences on user attention. Additionally, incorporating gaze-tracking technology could provide objective measures of attention shifts, validating whether high-contrast alerts truly capture peripheral vision in practice. These directions will help refine design guidelines and ensure their applicability across diverse real-world settings. The results of this study demonstrate that certain text-background color combinations, particularly high-contrast pairs such as white text on a blue background, significantly enhance detection speed and accuracy in the peripheral visual field under the conditions of divided attention. These findings are particularly relevant for the design of user interfaces that include peripheral visual elements requiring rapid recognition while the user's attention is directed toward central content. The experimental setup reflects scenarios commonly encountered in desktop-based interactive environments, where brief and dynamic visual information appears at the edges of the screen. The results support several design recommendations for improving peripheral visibility. High-contrast combinations, particularly white text on a blue background and black text on a white background, yielded the highest recognition accuracy (71% and 79%, respectively) and relatively short response times (1.376 s and 1.571 s). These combinations demonstrated a favorable balance between visibility and prompt detection. In contrast, combinations with lower luminance contrast or poor color pairing, such as white text on yellow (7% accuracy, 2.250 s) and black text on blue (28% accuracy, 1.829 s), were significantly less effective. Similarly, black text on green and black on red also showed lower accuracy rates (46% and 52%) and longer average durations, indicating slower and less reliable peripheral detection. These findings suggest that designers should prioritize strong luminance and hue contrast, particularly combinations involving dark backgrounds with light text or vice versa, to enhance peripheral detectability. Color pairs with insufficient perceptual differentiation, such as white on yellow, should be avoided due to their poor performance in both the recognition rate and response time.