Player stops percieving HUD - what's the psychological term?

Hi. I have another terminology question. This time from psychology.

How is the effect called when a player stops seeing a Heads-Up display as a display and only perceives all the parameters like healths or ammo count?

The closest term I found is "Inattentional blindness" but that's not exactly it. Because blindness means you ignore something on the screen completely. But in this case, you actually see the HUD and know how much health it shows, it's just you don't perceive this as HUD, only as a health amount.

Probably, it's similar to the situation with controls. You don't think in terms of "press this button" or "that button makes my character shoot", just - "go forward", "shoot!".

 

There are some advertises that trick you with colors. For example: the advert has tiny text that uses a color that makes you not notice it at all.

Are you thinking about this?

 

No, I'm not talking about optical illusion. I'm talking about things like the brain essentially not registering an object at all, regardless how it looks due to all attention focused on the game activity. That is called attention blindness. But the term I actually need is about when you see the object and are aware of what it shows but not registering it as itself.

 

I just tried looking it up. My search wasn't exactly exhaustive, but the closest I've found so far is "habituation".

The general term seems to fit, but the further explanation in that article doesn't because it's about failure to notice change to familiar things. In contrast, you're talking about noticing the change without noticing the thing that changed.

The same article mentions "Forgotten Baby Syndrome", but that doesn't fit either.

Here's an article talking about general "everyday blindness", but the stuff it talks about is all failure to notice a change, so it doesn't quite fit either, and I don't think they give it a name anyway.

You already mentioned it, but I think that Inattentional Blindness is pretty close. It's where you don't notice something because your focus is elsewhere, ie: scanning corners to spot threats, rather than looking down at the HUD. But combine that with the broad definition of habituation and you get exactly the effect you're referring to. I'm scanning corners so I don't look at the HUD, and when I hear the damage sound I unconsciously flick my eyes to the health bar to make an attack-or-retreat decision.

If a term doesn't already exist I'd suggest "Habituation Blindness" or "Habituation Transparency", where you stop noticing something consciously because it's such a habitual core of something else you're doing that it becomes full autopilot, unconscious rather than conscious.

 

I think Inattentional Blindness should be correct. It doesn't really mean "Because blindness means you ignore something on the screen completely."

Humans have limited cognitive resources, while seemingly trivial, it takes cognitive resources to look at a HUD, see the images, and actually interpret this as "this is a HUD". In a game environment, where you are focused on the game and important information such as the actual number/counter/bar/graph indicating your life left and whatever gameplay is going on, you aren't going to spare the resources to interpret the HUD as a HUD, but just the information relevant to the current task, i.e. finding out your current life. This would result in what you described "But in this case, you actually see the HUD and know how much health it shows, it's just you don't perceive this as HUD, only as a health amount."

One of the more famous examples would be the Monkey Business Illusion. Google it. People don't actually ignore the gorilla. Ignoring implies you are aware of its existence and choose to disregard it. Technically they actually saw it as their eyes took in the information, but their cognitive resources were focused on the task at hand "counting the number of passes" and they did not have the available cognitive resources to process other irrelevant (heuristically determined) information. In this case, they saw the Gorilla, but did not perceive it, similar to your HUD example.

I think seeing a HUD and perceiving it as a HUD would occur only in the beginning of the game when you are familiarizing yourself with the interface and recognize it? After that how often do you actively find yourself thinking "This is a game interface" or "This interface style is in the form of a HUD". I think for majority of the game operation, this would be irrelevant information. You might think "The health bar is on the top left" or "where is the freaking XYZ button", which would be relevant to the task you wish to perform but rarely "This is a game interface/HUD" which would usually not contribute anything to your current task.