ABSTRACT
From web pages to store shelves in supermarkets, consumers visually select specific objects as the targets of their actions, while avoiding and ignoring others. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight and speculate on the affective consequences for a stimulus that is selected for attention and response, as well as for those nontarget stimuli that are simultaneously ignored. What is labeled as “interesting” or “uninteresting”—in the James (1890) sense of the word-in one situation should affect how that information is processed and evaluated when reencountered at a future time. The simple act of visual selection should increase an object’s subsequent valuation; the simple act of ignoring an object should devalue it.
