This study investigates whether addressees visually attend to speakers’ gestures in interaction and whether attention is modulated by changes in social setting and display size. We compare a live face-to-face setting to two video conditions. In all conditions, the face dominates as a fixation target and only a minority of gestures draw fixations. The social and size parameters affect gaze mainly when combined and in the opposite direction from the predicted with fewer gestures fixated on video than live. Gestural holds (...) and speakers’ gaze at their own gestures reliably attract addressees’ fixations in all conditions. The attraction force of holds is unaffected by changes in social and size parameters, suggesting a bottom-up response, whereas speaker-fixated gestures draw significantly less attention in both video conditions, suggesting a social effect for overt gaze-following and visual joint attention. The study provides and validates a video-based paradigm enabling further experimental but ecologically valid explorations of cross-modal information processing. (shrink)

The visual behaviour of consumers buying 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, our methodology reveals differences between a decision-making task and a search task. In particular the second 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. (shrink)

Net paper readers have been shown to read deeper into articles than newspaper readers. It has also been claimed that newspaper readers rather scan than read newspapers. Do these findings mean that net paper readers read proportionally more than newspaper readers? This paper presents results showing that in fact net paper readers scan more and read less than newspaper readers. We furthermore investigate whether this result can be expained by the difference in layout, navigation structure and purpose of reading between (...) the two media. (shrink)

Misleading information and unfair commercial practices have to be viewed against the background of what consumers otherwise do, i.e., what their purchase decisions look like when no misleading information or no unfair commercial practices are in place. This article provides some of this background by studying how consumers sample information when making an in-store purchase decision. This was done by an eye-tracking study which reveals to what extent consumers succeed in purchasing the products that best meet their purchase intentions when (...) only a representative amount of misleading information is present. The study shows that decisions were suboptimal in relation to what the consumers claimed they wanted to purchase. Only in one product category did consumers in this study actually look at products that were slightly better than average, and as a result, they mainly selected products that were just as often poor as good. If the proportion of bad purchase decisions based on misleading information is small enough, perhaps it might be better to direct the authors’ attention to other ways of improving the decision environments that consumers encounter. In addition, the eye-tracking study provides some insight into how consumers sample information when making an in-store purchase decision. The present data show that consumers invested on average of less than 1 s to look at products. (shrink)

In Hegel's 'Aesthetics', one can find a strong distinction between the Hebraic, true sublimity and the Indian, positive sublime. The main thesis of our article is that, from the rhetorical and cognitive point of view, the two sublimities do not form an opposition, although from the theological point of view they do. In order to affirm the thesis, we briefly analyze the main figures of the sublime as presented in Pseudo-Longinos' 'On the Sublime' and the concept of the sublime in (...) Kant. According to our theory of the sublime, the Lyotardian formula of the sublime as 'presenting the unpresentable' should be expressed as 'representing the unimaginable'. When we examine the main examples of the Hebraic and the Indian sublime, we can easily see that in both literary cultures we can find a strong mimetic element as well as antimimetic evocation of the unimaginable. We identify the mimetic element in the sublime texts not only with space seen in accord with Kant but also with 'mimesis of emotion' which is regarded as the main form of mimesis in the ancient Greek tradition, for instance in Plato. (shrink)

Since listeners usually look at the speaker's face, gestural information has to be absorbed through peripheral visual perception. In the literature, it has been suggested that listeners look at gestures under certain circumstances: 1) when the articulation of the gesture is peripheral; 2) when the speech channel is insufficient for comprehension; and 3) when the speaker him- or herself indicates that the gesture is worthy of attention. The research here reported employs eye tracking techniques to study the perception of gestures (...) in face-to-face interaction. The improved control over the listener's visual channel allows us to test the validity of the above claims. We present preliminary findings substantiating claims 1 and 3, and relate them to theoretical proposals in the literature and to the issue of how visual and cognitive attention are related. (shrink)