Using Eye Tracking to Trace a Cognitive Process: Gaze Behaviour During Decision Making in a Natural Environment

• Main Authors: Kerstin Gidlöf, Annika Wallin, Richard Dewhurst, Kenneth Holmqvist
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bern Open Publishing 2013-01-01
• Series: Journal of Eye Movement Research
• Subjects: eye movements; decision-making; visual search; process tracing; natural environments
• Online Access: https://bop.unibe.ch/JEMR/article/view/2351

The visual behaviour of consumers buying (or searching for) products in a supermarket was measured and used to analyse the stages of their decision process. Traditionally metrics used to trace decision-making processes are difficult to use in natural environments that often contain many options and unstructured information. Unlike previous attempts in this direction (i.e. Russo & Leclerc, 1994), our methodology reveals differences between a decision-making task and a search task. In particular the second (evaluation) stage of a decision task contains more re-dwells than the second stage of a comparable search task. This study addresses the growing concern of taking eye movement research from the laboratory into the ‘real-world’, so findings can be better generalised to natural situations.