A Review of Eye-Tracking Methods in Tourism Research
Technological advancement provides opportunities for improvements in the methods academics use in their research. Traditional studies of advertising and interpretive material effectiveness typically use self-report surveys that are subject to subjectivity
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Abstract Technological advancement provides opportunities for improvements in the methods academics use in their research. Traditional studies of advertising and interpretive material effectiveness typically use self-report surveys that are subject to subjectivity and data validity bias. Eye-tracking technology provides researchers with an alternative, objective research method to study the processes involved in visual attention to and interest in such stimuli. Psychological research on eye movements began around one hundred years ago, but the recent development of cheap and reliable eye-tracking equipment makes it more accessible to tourism researchers, both for laboratory and in-situ data collection. Application of such eye-tracking methods may enlarge our understanding of our tourists’ attention and perception as cognitive processes. This chapter provides a review of eye-tracking methods, its theoretical basis, advantages and disadvantages, data collection and analysis procedures. Gaps in knowledge and topics for future research are provided. Keywords Eye-tracking · Attention · Marketing effectiveness · Tourism marketing
D. Le (*) College of Business and Management, Vin University, Hanoi, Vietnam e-mail: dung.le@griffithuni.edu.au A. Hadinejad · B. Moyle · N. Scott Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia e-mail: arghavan.hadinejad@griffithuni.edu.au; b.moyle@griffith.edu.au; noel.scott@griffith. edu.au J. Ma Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Rainoldi, M. Jooss (eds.), Eye Tracking in Tourism, Tourism on the Verge, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49709-5_2
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1 Introduction Early humans hunting dangerous animals or living in close social relationships who were able to direct their visual attention to relevant environmental stimuli rapidly were more likely to survive and reproduce. Thus to avoid information overload, human brains and sensory systems have evolved the capacity for selective attention and processing of goal-relevant visual stimuli (Davenport and Beck 2001). Consumers today use these same attentional processes to evaluate the saliency of the thousands of pieces of information in their environment, whether they are viewing television, social media or just walking down the street. As a case in point, a person thinking about taking a holiday is unable to process in detail all the information they may observe and collect during their extended search process. Instead, their attentional processes allow them to focus on only a few of many possible stimuli in the environment (Scott et al. 2019). Therefore, only marketing messages that attract the audience’s visual attention are processed and influence tourists’ behavioural intentions. Understanding and managing the audience’s visual attention is a key factor in designing effective and persuasive marketing messages (Wang and Sparks 2016). This applies to both traditional stimulus materials such as print advertisements, brochures or guidebooks, as well as websit
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