eyeScrollR: A software method for reproducible mapping of eye-tracking data from scrollable web pages.

The Internet has become an important part of our lives and an increasing number of researchers use eye-tracking technology to examine attention and behavior in online environments. Researchers, however, face a significant challenge in mapping eye-tracking data from scrollable web pages. We describe the R package eyeScrollR for mapping eye-tracking data from scrollable content such as web pages. The package re-maps eye-tracking gaze coordinates to full-page coordinates with a deterministic algorithm based on mouse scroll data. The package includes options for handling common situations, such as sticky menus or ads that remain visible when the user scrolls. We test the package's validity in different hardware and software settings and on different web pages and show that it is highly accurate when tested against manual coding. Compared to current methods, eyeScrollR provides a more reproducible and reliable approach for mapping eye-tracking data from scrollable web pages. With its open code and free availability, we recommend eyeScrollR as an essential tool for eye-tracking researchers, particularly those who adhere to open-science principles. The eyeScrollR package offers a valuable contribution to the field of eye-tracking research, facilitating accurate and standardized analysis of eye-tracking data in web scrolling contexts.

Uncertainty in learning, choice, and visual fixation.

Uncertainty plays a critical role in reinforcement learning and decision making. However, exactly how it influences behavior remains unclear. Multiarmed-bandit tasks offer an ideal test bed, since computational tools such as approximate Kalman filters can closely characterize the interplay between trial-by-trial values, uncertainty, learning, and choice. To gain additional insight into learning and choice processes, we obtained data from subjects' overt allocation of gaze. The estimated value and estimation uncertainty of options influenced what subjects looked at before choosing; these same quantities also influenced choice, as additionally did fixation itself. A momentary measure of uncertainty in the form of absolute prediction errors determined how long participants looked at the obtained outcomes. These findings affirm the importance of uncertainty in multiple facets of behavior and help delineate its effects on decision making.

Eye tracking: empirical foundations for a minimal reporting guideline.

In this paper, we present a review of how the various aspects of any study using an eye tracker (such as the instrument, methodology, environment, participant, etc.) affect the quality of the recorded eye-tracking data and the obtained eye-movement and gaze measures. We take this review to represent the empirical foundation for reporting guidelines of any study involving an eye tracker. We compare this empirical foundation to five existing reporting guidelines and to a database of 207 published eye-tracking studies. We find that reporting guidelines vary substantially and do not match with actual reporting practices. We end by deriving a minimal, flexible reporting guideline based on empirical research (Section "An empirically based minimal reporting guideline").

Increasing consumers' attention capture and food choice through bottom-up effects.

To guide consumers in their decision process, especially food products often carry labels indicating production method or nutritional content. However, past research shows that many labels are rarely attended to in the consumer's decision process. In order to enhance the effectiveness of such labels and to increase choice likelihood of labeled products, the label must capture attention. We address the question of how a single label on the product packaging can capture attention through bottom-up effects and increase choice through increased attention capture. To this end, we conducted a combined eye tracking and choice experiment manipulating the surface size and visual saliency - the two most important bottom-up effects on attention - of the Danish organic label across three food product categories. Results show a strong and significant increase in attention capture towards a larger and more visually salient label. Most importantly, the effect of attention capture carried over into increased choice likelihood. Both marketers and policy makers might benefit from this approach, which provides directions for designing product labels that can influence attention capture and product choice.

Threats to the validity of eye-movement research in psychology.

Eyetracking research in psychology has grown exponentially over the past decades, as equipment has become cheaper and easier to use. The surge in eyetracking research has not, however, been equaled by a growth in methodological awareness, and practices that are best avoided have become commonplace. We describe nine threats to the validity of eyetracking research and provide, whenever possible, advice on how to avoid or mitigate these challenges. These threats concern both internal and external validity and relate to the design of eyetracking studies, to data preprocessing, to data analysis, and to the interpretation of eyetracking data.

Covert attention leads to fast and accurate decision-making.

Decision-makers are regularly faced with more choice information than they can directly gaze at in a limited amount of time. Many theories assume that because decision-makers attend to information sequentially and overtly, that is, with direct gaze, they must respond to information overload by trading off between speed and decision accuracy. By reanalyzing five published studies, we show that participants, besides using overt attention, also use covert attention. That is, without being instructed to do so, participants attend to information without direct gaze to evaluate choice attributes that lead them to either choose the best or reject the worst option. We show that the use of covert attention is common for most participants and more so when information is easily identifiable in the peripheral visual field due to being large or visually salient. Covert attention is associated with faster decision times suggesting that participants might process multiple pieces of information simultaneously using distributed attention. Our findings highlight the importance of covert attention in decision-making and show how decision-makers may be gaining speed while retaining high levels of decision accuracy. We discuss how harnessing covert attention can benefit consumer decision-making of healthy and sustainable products. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A meta-analysis on the effect of visual attention on choice.

Decision makers attend more to preferred choice options and to the ultimately chosen option, but does visual attention influence preferences and choice? Several theories suggest that attention has a causal effect on preferences and choice and a growing number of studies have examined the question with experimental methods. However, the evidence for an effect of attention on choice is mixed and highly contended. To advance the debate on the role of attention in decision making, we meta-analyze studies that manipulate attention-to-choice options and measure the effect on 2-alternative preferential choices. We identify 3 different methods for manipulating attention and find that studies manipulating total exposure time enhance choices the most, P = .541, 95% CI [.523, .560], p < .001, followed by studies controlling the location of the last fixation, P = .532, 95% CI [.518, .547], p < .001. Studies manipulating the location of the first fixation do not differ from chance level choice proportions, P = .507, 95% CI [0.497, 0.516], p = .18. The PET-PEESE analysis suggests a small degree of publication bias which results in a slight reduction of effect sizes. A meta-regression with absolute attention difference as predictor confirms the robustness of the findings. Our findings show the relevance of assuming an effect of attention on choice, but also indicate a need for further model development to account for the complete pattern of attention effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The visual environment and attention in decision making.

Visual attention is a fundamental aspect of most everyday decisions, and governments and companies spend vast resources competing for the attention of decision makers. In natural environments, choice options differ on a variety of visual factors, such as salience, position, or surface size. However, most decision theories ignore such visual factors, focusing on cognitive factors such as preferences as determinants of attention. To provide a systematic review of how the visual environment guides attention we meta-analyze 122 effect sizes on eye movements in decision making. A psychometric meta-analysis and Top10 sensitivity analysis show that visual factors play a similar or larger role than cognitive factors in determining attention. The visual factors that most influence attention are positioning information centrally, ρ = .43 (Top10 = .67), increasing the surface size, ρ = .35 (Top10 = .43), reducing the set size of competing information elements, ρ = .24 (Top10 = .24), and increasing visual salience, ρ = .13 (Top10 = .24). Cognitive factors include attending more to preferred choice options and attributes, ρ = .36 (Top10 = .31), effects of task instructions on attention, ρ = .35 (Top10 = .21), and attending more to the ultimately chosen option, ρ = .59 (Top10 = .26). Understanding real-world decision making will require the integration of both visual and cognitive factors in future theories of attention and decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A meta-analysis of blood glucose effects on human decision making.

The academic and public interest in blood glucose and its relationship to decision making has been increasing over the last decade. To investigate and evaluate competing theories about this relationship, we conducted a psychometric meta-analysis on the effect of blood glucose on decision making. We identified 42 studies relating to 4 dimensions of decision making: willingness to pay, willingness to work, time discounting, and decision style. We did not find a uniform influence of blood glucose on decision making. Instead, we found that low levels of blood glucose increase the willingness to pay and willingness to work when a situation is food related, but decrease willingness to pay and work in all other situations. Low levels of blood glucose increase the future discount rate for food; that is, decision makers become more impatient, and to a lesser extent increase the future discount rate for money. Low levels of blood glucose also increase the tendency to make more intuitive rather than deliberate decisions. However, this effect was only observed in situations unrelated to food. We conclude that blood glucose has domain-specific effects, influencing decision making differently depending on the relevance of the situation to acquiring food. (PsycINFO Database Record

Effects of salience are both short- and long-lived.

A salient object can attract attention irrespective of its relevance to current goals. However, this bottom up effect tends to be short-lived (e.g. <150 ms) and it is generally assumed that top down processes such as goals or task instructions operating in later time windows override the effect of salience operating in early time windows. While the majority of studies on visual search and scene viewing comply with the assumptions of top down and bottom up processes operating in different time windows and that the former overrides the latter, we point to some possible anomalies in decision research. To explore these anomalies and thereby test the two key assumptions, we manipulate the salience and valence of one information cue in a decision task. Our analyses reveal that in decision tasks top down and bottom up processes do not operate in different time windows as predicted, nor does the former process necessarily override the latter. Instead, we find that the maximum effect of salience on the likelihood of making a saccade to the target cue is delayed until about 20 saccades after stimulus onset and that the effects of salience and valence are additive rather than multiplicative. Further, we find that in the positive and neutral valence conditions, salience continues to exert pressure on saccadic latency, i.e. the interval between saccades to the target with high salience targets being fixated faster than low salience targets. Our findings challenge the assumption that top down and bottom up processes operate in different time windows and the assumption that top down processes necessarily override bottom up processes.

Attention to advertising and memory for brands under alcohol intoxication.

In an attempt to discover new possibilities for advertising in uncluttered environments marketers have recently begun using ambient advertising in, for instance, bars and pubs. However, advertising in such licensed premises have to deal with the fact that many consumers are under the influence of alcohol while viewing the ad. This paper examines the effect of alcohol intoxication on attention to and memory for advertisements in two experiments. Study 1 used a forced exposure manipulation and revealed increased attention to logos under alcohol intoxication consistent with the psychopharmacological prediction that alcohol intoxication narrows attention to the more salient features in the visual environment. Study 2 used a voluntary exposure manipulation in which ads were embedded in a magazine. The experiment revealed that alcohol intoxication reduces voluntary attention to ads and leads to a significant reduction in memory for the viewed ads. In popular terms consuming one or two beers reduces brand recall from 40 to 36% while being heavily intoxicated further reduces brand recall to 17%.

A review of the findings and theories on surface size effects on visual attention.

That surface size has an impact on attention has been well-known in advertising research for almost a century; however, theoretical accounts of this effect have been sparse. To address this issue, we review studies on surface size effects on eye movements in this paper. While most studies find that large objects are more likely to be fixated, receive more fixations, and are fixated faster than small objects, a comprehensive explanation of this effect is still lacking. To bridge the theoretical gap, we relate the findings from this review to three theories of surface size effects suggested in the literature: a linear model based on the assumption of random fixations (Lohse, 1997), a theory of surface size as visual saliency (Pieters etal., 2007), and a theory based on competition for attention (CA; Janiszewski, 1998). We furthermore suggest a fourth model - demand for attention - which we derive from the theory of CA by revising the underlying model assumptions. In order to test the models against each other, we reanalyze data from an eye tracking study investigating surface size and saliency effects on attention. The reanalysis revealed little support for the first three theories while the demand for attention model showed a much better alignment with the data. We conclude that surface size effects may best be explained as an increase in object signal strength which depends on object size, number of objects in the visual scene, and object distance to the center of the scene. Our findings suggest that advertisers should take into account how objects in the visual scene interact in order to optimize attention to, for instance, brands and logos.

Attention and choice: a review on eye movements in decision making.

This paper reviews studies on eye movements in decision making, and compares their observations to theoretical predictions concerning the role of attention in decision making. Four decision theories are examined: rational models, bounded rationality, evidence accumulation, and parallel constraint satisfaction models. Although most theories were confirmed with regard to certain predictions, none of the theories adequately accounted for the role of attention during decision making. Several observations emerged concerning the drivers and down-stream effects of attention on choice, suggesting that attention processes plays an active role in constructing decisions. So far, decision theories have largely ignored the constructive role of attention by assuming that it is entirely determined by heuristics, or that it consists of stochastic information sampling. The empirical observations reveal that these assumptions are implausible, and that more accurate assumptions could have been made based on prior attention and eye movement research. Future decision making research would benefit from greater integration with attention research.