CAPTURING BANNER BLINDNESS IN A NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
Summary
In this study it was analysed if a mobile eye-tracker can be used to investigate the attention drawing power of a stimulus in a natural environment. This was studied because, it is a promising method to measure the effect of advertisement posters. If people observeadvertisements was investigated previously on websites. Benway and Lane (1998) foundthat subjects avoided looking at these banners and called it banner blindness. Therefore, itwas expected that a natural equivalent of banner blindness exist as well.For this experiment 19 subjects were divided into 2 conditions. The attention drawingpower of various targets was measured with a mobile eye-tracker. The subjects assigned tothe first condition were searching for the targets. The subjects in the second condition wereasked to just look around. The amount of targets that are fixated on, and the time until thetarget was first fixated on were compared between the two groups.It turned out it is not possible to determine if the real world equivalent of bannerblindness exists. Using the mobile eye-tracker was harder than previously thought for tworeasons. First, analysing areas of interest is for practical reasons to difficult. Secondly, thetargets often where not fixated on but were detected by the subjects. Furthermore, it was found out that the searching subjects used a wider range of their visual field in the direction of the x-axis. They did not use larger saccades to find the targets than the free viewers