Shortcomings in Standalone Applications

Advertising practitioners often implicitly assume that more visual attention means a positive reaction to the attended element, based on a common intuition that greater attention reflects greater interest, and greater interest equals a positive reaction or liking. This heuristic is strongly supported in everyday language; when we say "I am interested," we usually mean, "I like it." However in tests in commercial settings, we have frequently found that the most visually attended elements do not trigger positive reactions (as indicated by the frontal asymmetry paradigm). Instead, such elements can cause negative or neutral reactions (e.g., when a product and the visual do not match). We therefore posit that attentional focus does not necessarily lead to positive emotional reactions.

Standalone eye-tracking measures cannot assign emotional valence to attended stimuli though, nor can they offer definitive information about consumers' emotional experience when they view an advertisement. Gazes, scan paths, and heat maps can provide valuable information about visual attention, but they still are not able to reveal affective aspects of the stimuli. Some theories associate pupil dilation with emotional engagement, though this measure is questionable, because many factors can influence pupil dilation that have nothing to do with the emotional engagement, such as changes in illumination (Beatty and Lucero-Wagoner 2000), cognitive workload (Kahneman and Tversky 1973; Kramer 1991), and participants' gaze angle (Kleinke 1986). Thus pupil dilation alone cannot be considered an indicator of affective states.

To determine what emotional valence is associated with visually attended stimuli, researchers have two options: verbal declarations of respondents or analyses of nonverbal brain reactions. Declarative measures are much simpler and easier to gather but may be biased by cognitive distortions typical of post factum responses (e.g., primacy or recency) and rarely correspond to the time flow of emotional reactions (Matukin and Ohme, in press). Brain imaging measures are not susceptible to such cognitive distortions because they do not require verbal reactions from respondents (Ohme et al. 2009).

The EEG measures of emotions can precisely detect changes in brain activity generated by marketing communications. The most widely used methods aggregate moment-to-moment measures into a single mean value or use event-related potentials (Ma et al. 2008; Zhang et al. 2003). Yet standalone EEG analyses also lose information about temporal dynamics and the flow of emotional reactions. Thus they cannot reveal which objects evoke the observed emotional reactions-the brand, a headline, or visuals?

To find the answer, we suggest administering EEG in parallel with observations of eye movements. We thus need to synchronize recordings from both independent sources, which offers an opportunity to determine the foundations of cognitive and emotional reactions to incoming visual stimuli and infer both analytic and holistic meanings of marketing messages. In other words, this integration should be able to capture what we feel when we look at something. We present a brief example of exploratory research that integrates EEG with eye-tracking recordings to contribute to a better understanding of how consumers process visual stimulation. We thus highlight the great opportunity of such integration for a greater comprehension of the "mental mechanics" in response to interactive advertising.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 684