Visual Attention and Aesthetic Evaluation of Two-Color TV-Cabinet Decorative Finishes in Older Adults

For age-friendly furniture surface design, the color of a TV-cabinet finish affects not only visual comfort in the living room but also older users’ aesthetic preferences, perceived harmony, and emotional acceptance of furniture products. To clarify how older adults perceive hue, value, and the dominant–secondary area relationship in two-color decorative finishes for TV cabinets, this study used a digital model with a unified form and constructed surface color schemes varying in hue, value, and two-color dominance. The experiment contained two parts. Experiment 1 examined the differences in subjective evaluation and visual attention under colored hue × value conditions. Experiment 2 examined the changes in preference and attention under dominant/secondary color relationship × colored hue × value conditions. Thirty-five older participants completed an eye-tracking experiment and a seven-point semantic-differential questionnaire. The results showed that: (1) a three-item aesthetic scale comprising pleasure, simplicity, and order showed good internal consistency in both experiments; (2) hue had a significant effect on subjective pleasantness, while significant interactions indicated that preference also depended on specific combinations of hue, value, and color relationship—yellow showed relatively high descriptive pleasantness ratings under the tested conditions; and (3) the viewing duration varied with the experimental color factors, whereas no statistically significant associations were detected between subjective pleasantness and either the viewing duration or the fixation count under the tested conditions, suggesting that visual-attention measures and subjective preferences provide complementary rather than equivalent information. These findings provide preliminary empirical evidence from subjective evaluation and eye-movement data for further exploration of color configurations in age-friendly furniture decorative finishes and coating surfaces.