ABSTRACT
Consumers are surrounded by a wealth of visual commercial stimuli, including advertisements in newspapers and magazines and on television, internet sites, and social media. The abundance of commercial stimuli in their environment severely taxes the attention and information processing capacities of consumers. Eye tracking is a powerful method to investigate how consumers attend to these stimuli, search and process the visual information contained in them, and form preferences. It is increasingly used in consumer psychology. The growth of eye tracking research is partly driven by technological innovations in the development of eye tracking devices, which makes studies in more natural settings feasible, and by sharp declines in the costs of modern eye tracking solutions. Until recently, eye tracking was more time-consuming and expensive. This situation has changed owing to new generations of eye trackers that enable eye movement recordings of large amounts of stimuli and consumers under natural exposure conditions at high precision and low cost. Moreover, the benefits of recording moment-to-moment behavior rather than using self-reported memory measures of attention and information acquisition are increasingly being discovered and documented (Orquin and Mueller Loose, 2013; Wedel and Pieters, 2007, 2008).
