The Visual Environment and Attention in Decision Making

Abstract

Visual attention is a fundamental aspect of most everyday decisions, and governments and companies spend vast resources competing for the attention of decision makers. In natural environments, choice options differ on a variety of visual factors, such as salience, position, or surface size. However, most decision theories ignore such visual factors, focusing on cognitive factors such as preferences as determinants of attention. To provide a systematic review of how the visual environment guides attention we meta-analyze 122 effect sizes on eye movements in decision making. A psychometric meta-analysis and Top10 sensitivity analysis show that visual factors play a similar or larger role than cognitive factors in determining attention. The visual factors that most influence attention are positioning information centrally, ρ =.43 (Top10 =.67), increasing the surface size, ρ =.35 (Top10 =.43), reducing the set size of competing information elements, ρ =.24 (Top10 =.24), and increasing visual salience, ρ=.13 (Top10 =.24). Cognitive factors include attending more to preferred choice options and attributes, ρ =.36 (Top10 =.31), effects of task instructions on attention, ρ =.35 (Top10 =.21), and attending more to the ultimately chosen option, ρ =.59 (Top10 =.26). Understanding real-world decision making will require the integration of both visual and cognitive factors in future theories of attention and decision making