Eyetracking-project

Eyetracking-project

Title: A study of the role of decoding and visual attention hierarchies in consumers’ understanding of verbal and nonverbal design elements on food labels in the purchasing situation.


Period: 2008-2009.


Grant: The Independent Research Fund Denmark: Communication and Culture (169,000 DKK).


Brief description: The project was part of and complemented the wider research efforts of the project “Spin or fair speak: When foods talk”. The aim was to contribute to a better theoretical and empirical understanding of relationships between consumers’ distribution of their visual attention on the verbal and nonverbal design elements of food packages in a purchasing situation (the visual attention hierarchy) and the impact of the resultant search patterns on their expectations and choices (the semantic decoding hierarchy). The grant contributed to the purchase of a state-of-the-art stationary eye-tracking device for conducting tests in simulated purchase situations in support of the above goals.

Participants:

The FairSpeak Group, Copenhagen Business School (CBS).

Part of the tests were carried out in collaboration with the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) and the Humanities Lab, Lund University.