ABSTRACT
The human visual system is central in natural tasks that consumers daily engage in, such as viewing and reading advertising, and inspecting, searching and choosing brands and products in brick and mortar and virtual shopping environments. The visual system rapidly and largely automatically accomplishes a host of functions that are vital to consumers’ goal-directed behavior. Moreover, the visual system is most likely centrally implicated in learning, higherorder, cognitive-affective processes, decision making and its behavioral implementation and coordination. Yet, relatively little attention in marketing and consumer science is devoted to the role of such visual processes, with several notable exceptions in this edited volume. Aristotle (trans. 1991), in his theory of rhetoric, already stressed the importance of “bringing before the eyes,” to actualize and bring to life rather than to rely only on the force of logical, verbal arguments in order to persuade people. In a recent analysis of decision-making research, Loewenstein (2001, p. 503) argues that people often do not choose between alternative courses of behavior by explicitly weighting their costs and benefits. Instead, “people rely on cognitive capabilities that are relatively well developed, such as visual perception and object recognition, rather than operations that they are not very good at, like addition and multiplication.” If this
holds true, what happens when consumers are exposed to advertisements and similar visual marketing stimuli, with various forms of text and pictorials? How do consumers move their eyes across such complex scenes to extract information that is relevant to their current goals, what do they pay attention to, and how does this affect their decision making and choices? And more generally, how are eye movements related to higher-order cognitive and affective processes and to consumer behaviors of interest in marketing?
