When making decisions, people tend to look back and forth between the alternatives until they eventually make a choice. Eye-tracking research has established that these shifts in attention are strongly linked to choice outcomes. A predominant framework for understanding the dynamics of the choice process, and thus the effects of attention, is sequential sampling of information. However, existing methods for estimating the attention parameters in these models are computationally costly and overly flexible, and yield estimates with unknown precision and bias. Here we propose an estimation method that relies on a link between sequential sampling models and random utility models (RUM). This method uses familiar econometric tools (i.e., logistic regression) and yields estimates that appear to be unbiased and relatively precise compared to existing methods, in a small fraction of the computation time. The RUM thus appears to be a useful tool for estimating the effects of attention on choice.

We examine the ability of eye movement data to help understand the determinants of decision-making over risky prospects. We start with structural models of choice under risk, and use that structure to inform what we identify from the use of process data in addition to choice data. We find that information on eye movements does significantly affect the extent and nature of probability weighting behavior. Our structural model allows us to show the pathway of the effect, rather than simply identifying a reduced form effect. This insight should be of importance for the normative design of choice mechanisms for risky products. We also show that decision-response duration is no substitute for the richer information provided by eye-tracking.

The high rewards people desire are often unlikely. Here, we investigated whether decision-makers exploit such ecological correlations between risks and rewards to simplify their information processing. In a learning phase, participants were exposed to options in which risks and rewards were negatively correlated, positively correlated, or uncorrelated. In a subsequent risky choice task, where the emphasis was on making either a ‘fast’ or the ‘best’ possible choice, participants’ eye movements were tracked. The changes in the number, distribution, and direction of eye fixations in ‘fast’ trials did not differ between the risk–reward conditions. In ‘best’ trials, however, participants in the negatively correlated condition lowered their evidence threshold, responded faster, and deviated from expected value maximization more than in the other risk–reward conditions. The results underscore how conclusions about people’s cognitive processing in risky choice can depend on risk–reward structures, an often neglected environmental property.

Encountering new words multiple times in the input is crucial for incidental vocabulary acquisition. While there is extensive research exploring the impact of word frequency on both learning and processing of novel vocabulary during reading, there is a notable gap in studies examining how contextual factors impact these processes, especially when reading texts, rather than short sentences. The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring the effect of contextual diversity or sameness on adult L2 English learners’ processing and incidental learning of novel lexical items through repeated reading of complete texts. Participants (N = 42) read one short story three times as well as three different stories, while their eye movements were recorded. Each contextual condition (Same vs. Different) contained ten pseudowords, repeated six times across the treatment. Participants were tested on both immediate and delayed vocabulary learning via form and meaning recognition tests. Our results indicate that repeated readings of the same text led to faster processing as well as better short-term learning of novel vocabulary, although this advantage was not retained for long-term learning. In contrast, initial encoding and lexical integration took longer in the Different condition, although this was not reflected in higher vocabulary gains either in the short- or the long term.

Ideally, survey respondents read and understand survey instructions, questions, and response scales, and provide answers that carefully reflect their beliefs, attitudes, or knowledge. However, respondents may also arrive at their responses using cues or heuristics that facilitate the production of a response, but diminish the targeted information content. We use eye-tracking data as covariates in a Bayesian switching-mixture model to identify different response behaviors at the item–respondent level. The model distinguishes response behaviors that are predominantly influenced either positively or negatively by the previous response, and responses that reflect respondents’ preexisting knowledge and experiences of interest. We find that controlling for multiple types of adaptive response behaviors allows for a more informative analysis of survey data and respondents.

This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s (age 3–7) comprehension development of novel and conventional metonymy, combining online and offline methods. Both online and offline data show significantly better performances from the oldest group (6-to-7-year-old) and a delayed acquisition of conventional metonymy compared with novel metonymy. However, part of offline data shows no significant difference between adjacent age groups, while the eye-tracking data show a chronological development from age 3–7. Furthermore, in offline tasks, the three-year-old group features a high choice randomness and the four-to-five-year-olds show the longest reaction time. Therefore, we argue that, not only age but also metonymy type can influence metonymy acquisition, and that a lack of socio-cultural experience can be a source of acquisition difficulty for children under six. Methodologically speaking, we believe that online methods should not be considered superior to offline ones as they investigate different aspects of implicit and explicit language comprehension.

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers communicate by transmitting information close to a constant rate. When choosing between two syntactic variants, it claims that speakers prefer the variant distributing information most evenly, avoiding signal peaks and troughs. If speakers prefer transmitting information uniformly, then comprehenders should also prefer a uniform signal, experiencing difficulty whenever confronted with informational peaks. However, the literature investigating this hypothesis has focused mostly on production, with only a few studies considering comprehension. In this study, we investigate comprehension in two eye-tracking experiments. Participants read sentences of two different lengths, reflecting different degrees of density, containing either a dense structure (a nominal compound, NC) or a structure that spreads the information through more words (a noun followed by a prepositional phrase, PP). Favoring the UID hypothesis, participants gazed longer at text segments following the critical structure when it was an NC than when it was a PP. They also regressed more in sentences containing longer structures. However, the pattern of results was not as clear as expected, potentially reflecting participants’ experience with the denser structure or task differences between production and comprehension. These aspects should be taken into account in future research investigating the UID hypothesis for comprehension.

Quantifier spreading (Q-spreading), children’s incorrect falsification of a universally-quantified sentence based on an ‘extra-object’ picture, may persist beyond childhood, and children adhere to Q-spreading without changing responses throughout testing. We examined the error patterns across wider age groups (aged 4-79) with a picture-sentence verification eye-tracking task. We also examined whether prosodic emphasis affects their comprehension and processing of universally-quantified sentences. Whereas adults’ comprehension was ceiling, children/adolescents (aged 4-17) showed various comprehension patterns, splitting into: ‘Adult-like responders’ (consistently adult-like), ‘Q-spreaders’ (consistently showing Q-spreading), and ‘Switchers’ (shifted from Q-spreading to adult-like). While adults rarely looked at the extra-object, ‘Q-spreaders’ showed frequent looks throughout testing, and both ‘Switchers’ and ‘Adult-like responders’ exhibited reduced looks to the extra-object, suggesting that avoidance and correction of Q-spreading requires inhibition of the visual attention to the extra-object. The effect of prosodic emphasis on eye movement emerged later for children/adolescents than adults.

We investigated the predictive processing of grammatical number information through stem-vowel alternations in German strong verbs by adult first language (L1) speakers and Dutch-speaking advanced second language (L2) learners of German, and the influence of working memory and awareness (i.e., whether participants consciously registered the predictive cue) thereon. While changed stem vowels indicate a singular referent (e.g., /ε/ in fällt3SG, “falls”), unchanged vowels indicate plural (e.g., /a/ in fallt2PL, “fall”). This target structure presents a challenge for L2 learners of German due to its subregularity and low salience. With their eye movements being tracked, participants matched German auditory sentences (VSO order) with one of two pictures, displaying identical action scenes but varying in agent number. The number cue provided by the strong verbs allowed participants to predict whether the upcoming subject would be singular or plural. The analyses revealed significant prediction, measured as predictive eye movements toward the target picture and faster button-press responses. Prediction in the L2 group was weaker than in the L1 group and present in the eye movement data only. Higher working memory scores were linked to faster predictive presses. Approximately half of the participants had become aware of the predictive cue, and being aware facilitated prediction to a limited extent.

Understanding user perceptions of interacting with the virtual world is one of the research focuses in recent years, given the rapid proliferation of virtual reality (VR) and driven to establish the metaverse. Users can generate a familiar connection between their bodies and the virtual world by being embodied in virtual hands, and hand representations can induce users’ embodiment in VR. The sense of embodiment represents the cognitive awareness of one's manifestation and includes three subcomponents: the sense of body ownership, agency and self-location. There is insufficient evidence in the literature about the effects of hand designs on the embodiment, especially based on studying its three subcomponents. This study investigates how virtual hand designs with five realism levels influence the three subcomponents of embodiment in VR. This research employs a self-report questionnaire commonly used in the literature to assess embodiment and evaluates agency and self-location by introducing implicit methods (intentional binding and proprioceptive measurement) derived from psychology. Besides, the objective data of eye tracking is used to explore the connection between embodiment and hand designs, and classifying participants’ eye tracking data to help analyze the link between embodiment and user attention. Overall, this research makes a major contribution through a systematic exploration of users’ embodied experience in VR and offers important evidence of the effects of virtual hand designs on body ownership, agency, and self-location, respectively. In addition, this study provides a valuable reference for further investigation of embodiment through implicit and objective methods, and practical design recommendations for virtual hand design in VR applications.

Researchers have taken great interest in the assessment of text readability. This study expands on this research by developing readability models that predict the processing effort involved during first language (L1) and second language (L2) text reading. Employing natural language processing tools, the study focused on assessing complex linguistic features of texts, and these features were used to explain the variance in processing effort, as evidenced by eye movement data for L1 or L2 readers of English that were extracted from an open eye-tracking corpus. Results indicated that regression models using the indices of complex linguistic features provided better performance in predicting processing effort for both L1 and L2 reading than the models using simple linguistic features (word and sentence length). Furthermore, many of the predictive variables were lexical features for both L1 and L2 reading, emphasizing the importance of decoding for fluent reading regardless of the language used.

In two studies on mobile phone purchase decisions, we investigated consumers’ decision strategies with a newly developed process tracing tool called InterActive Process Tracing (IAPT). This tool is a combination of several process tracing techniques (Active Information Search, Mouselab, and retrospective verbal protocol). After repeatedly choosing one of four mobile phones, participants formalized their strategy so that it could be used to make choices for them. The choices made by the identified strategies correctly predicted the observed choices in 73% (Experiment 1) and 67% (Experiment 2) of the cases. Moreover, in Experiment 2 we directly compared Mouselab and eye tracking with respect to their impact on information search and strategy description. We found only minor differences between these two methods. We conclude that IAPT is a useful research tool to identify choice strategies, and that using eye tracking technology did not increase its validity beyond that gained with Mouselab.

The endowment effect has been debated for over 30 years. Recent research suggests that differential focus of attention might play a role in shaping preferences. In two studies we investigated the role of biased attention in the emergence of endowment effects. We thereby derive predictions from an extended version of evidence accumulation models by additionally assuming a bias in attentional allocation based on one’s endowment status. We test these predictions against an alternative account in which the endowment effect is the result of initial anchoring and adjustment differences (Sequential Value Matching model; Johnson & Busemeyer, 2005). In both studies we add deliberation time constraints to a standard Willingness-to-Accept/Willingness-to-Pay paradigm and consistently find that the endowment effect grows as deliberation time increases. In Study 2 we additionally use eye tracking and find that buyers focus more on value decreasing attributes than sellers (and vice versa for value increasing attributes). This shift in attention plays a pivotal role in the construction of value and partially mediates the endowment effect.

Repeated decision making is subject to changes over time such as decreases in decision time and information use and increases in decision accuracy. We show that a traditional strategy selection view of decision making cannot account for these temporal dynamics without relaxing main assumptions about what defines a decision strategy. As an alternative view we suggest that temporal dynamics in decision making are driven by attentional and perceptual processes and that this view has been expressed in the information reduction hypothesis. We test the information reduction hypothesis by integrating it in a broader framework of top down and bottom up processes and derive the predictions that repeated decisions increase top down control of attention capture which in turn leads to a reduction in bottom up attention capture. To test our hypotheses we conducted a repeated discrete choice experiment with three different information presentation formats. We thereby operationalized top down and bottom up control as the effect of individual utility levels and presentation formats on attention capture on a trial-by-trial basis. The experiment revealed an increase in top down control of eye movements over time and that decision makers learn to attend to high utility stimuli and ignore low utility stimuli. We furthermore find that the influence of presentation format on attention capture reduces over time indicating diminishing bottom up control.

Currently, a disparity exists between the process-level models decision researchers use to describe and predict decision behavior and the methods implemented and metrics collected to test these models. The current work seeks to remedy this disparity by combining the advantages of work in decision research (mouse-tracing paradigms with contingent information display) and cognitive psychology (eye-tracking paradigms from reading and scene perception). In particular, we introduce a new decision moving-window paradigm that presents stimulus information contingent on eye fixations. We provide data from the first application of this method to risky decision making, and show how it compares to basic eye-tracking and mouse-tracing methods. We also enumerate the practical, theoretical, and analytic advantages this method offers above and beyond both mouse-tracing with occlusion and basic eye tracking of information without occlusion. We include the use of new metrics that offer more precision than those typically calculated on mouse-tracing data as well as those not possible or feasible within the mouse-tracing paradigm.