Attention dynamics: antecedents to consumer choice

This chapter reviews four decades of research on consumer attention and decision-making, focusing on how visual information influences preferences, attitudes, and choice. It traces methodological advances from early information display boards to modern eye tracking technologies, highlighting their role in capturing naturalistic attention patterns. The chapter explores visual marketing, examining how complexity, saliency, and repeated exposures shape consumer behavior. Studies show that attention allocation predicts preferences and choices, with concepts like gaze bias, visual equity, and the Scanpath Theory illustrating consistent patterns. The chapter concludes with valuation models, including the attentional Drift Diffusion Model, which incorporates gaze data to explain how attention modulates evidence accumulation during choice. By integrating findings from consumer behavior, psychology, and neuroscience, the chapter details visual attention’s role in consumer decision-making.