This image was taken from Elle magazine. It is an advertisement for Cover Girl mascara. The direct message is telling viewers that if you buy this product you can achieve “big and bold lashes with a hint of shimmer”. The indirect message is hinting that if you purchase this mascara you can be pretty and popular like Drew Barrymore.
The image is a head shot of Barrymore, with her head slightly cocked to the left and she is gazing straight ahead to the viewers as to engage with them while showing the viewer how long her lashes are. This is a common poise for this kind of advertisement. In fact the first five or so pages, not all of them cosmetic advertisements, of this particular magazine contain women in this similar position. The tilting of the head creates a imbalance to the picture which draws the attention towards her. Concentrating on her face helps to draw viewers to the intended selling feature, her eyes which is slightly above the center of the page, and the model herself.
To offset (or reduce the stress) the imbalance of the pose, the mascara icon and white text is placed the lower left hand corner. The additional text Cover Girl is, in the same complementary color as the mascara image is placed right on the top of the page to create more balance

The goal of this puzzle is to connect the five men, (A-E) to their designated house, creating five different routes that did not cross path. We were allowed to go horizontally, vertically but not diagonally. My husband, Brian, and I had different tactics but ended with similar results. My first attempt had me placing a straight line from man A to the house A. My strategy was to attack it without really thinking about it. I intuitively went with the man with the longest distance to his house. My first attempt apparently did not work. By going straight down the page, it created a road blocks for the other men. My second attempt was just as spontaneous as my first, only this time I tried to connect the man C with his house while working simultaneously with house A, trying not to cross path. It worked. After that I connected the D's together and everything fell into place. I had the men and house connected very quickly after that.
Brian's attempts were more planned out than mines. His first attempt was to connect man A with his house, also. He had the same logic that if he connected the man with the longest distance first then the others should be easy. It took him several tries before he was successful. Unlike me, his approach was to tackle each men one at a time. In the end we ended up completing each task in the same order with the exception that his was planned out and I went forward without considering a plan.

This second puzzle was harder than the first one. The goal was to match the 12 shapes into pairs, with one pair that does not resemble each other. We thought it was going to be fairly easy because this puzzle involves us mentally rotating the images and matching them with their pairs. We were able to get both A, I and C, D correctly because they required us to mentally rotate the pieces once. As the other pieces required more mental rotating, shifting and flipping our matching capabilities got worse. We made the same amount of errors. We both only got the two set correctly.

Visual search feature hierarchies continued...

As mentioned before with low level processing, that feature is biased and tuned into what a viewer is attempting to see, consciously or subconsciously. The brain processes the visual scene in parallel combing two preattentive feature at once to provides an easy, natural, "instantaneous" view of attributes, such as the "what and where", that one is looking for . The advantages of this process is that it grabs the viewers attention first. The process also makes "visual searches faster and more efficient".
This image is a good example of preattentive features. The below image is provide by Sage Media design company. Their link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/sagemedia/1732739146/. The candy boxes are in a vibrant purple,orange and green color. Coloring being one of the most powerful preattentive feature helps draw the attention onto the boxes. The colors are limited to three basic colors with modifying hues for the brand logo. By limiting the number of color helps avoid conjunction searches (searches with more than five elements or attributes within a search). According to researcher Anne Treisman "increasing the number of element in the display would produce a corresponding increased in the time required to notice the target". In this case, less is better.
The shape of the boxes are rectangle, vertically, long . The images of the content ,placed slightly higher than the middle of the box, is the same shape, rectangle, but the label is placed horizontally to provide a nice contrast. The images also provides depth to the otherwise flatness of the lettering on the boxes.

This is my first semester at State University. I am a DAI major, focusing on product design. Due to budget cuts I was not able to get all core prerequisite classes, for the program, this semester so I end up taking general education classes, marketing and economics. The classes do not excite me like Art classes does. The above image, taken from gettyimages.com, appropriately present an image of how I feel sometimes in these classes.
In the Top-Down visual processing high level attention is geared towards either a "cognitive driven or action driven goal", according to Vision Queries. It requires "linking and relinking" of images to complete a task. The task during class lectures is to focus on the teacher's lecture. My attention should be direct to them but because I have no interest in either classes my attention gets diverted to my cell phone (anticipating when the class will end), notes on the table, the door (for a quick exit), and back to the instructor.
The constant shifting of attention is assisted through the low level process. Low level processing, uses "features and elementary pattern analysis" and is biased towards what is being seek. The fixations are short and quick to get an "overview" of the room and task to be completed. The shifting from the cell phone, a small rectangle object, to the teacher then chalkboard, a larger green horizontal rectangle that is situated behind the teacher. Then the fixations become longer to comprehend the end task, which is to leave the classroom.