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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• eye movements
• decision-making
• visual search
• process tracing
• natural environments