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The purpose of this paper aims to investigate the effect of a model's eye gaze direction on the information processing behavior of consumers varying based on their gender.

An eye-tracking experiment and a memory test are conducted to test the research hypotheses.

Compared to an averted gaze, a model with a direct gaze attracts more attention to the model's face among male consumers, leading to deeper processing. However, the findings show that when a model displays a direct gaze rather than an averted gaze, female consumers pay more attention to the brand name, thus leading to deeper processing.

This study contributes to not only the existing eye gaze direction literature by integrating the facilitative effect of direct gaze and considering the moderating role of consumer gender on consumer information processing but also the literature concerning the selectivity hypothesis by providing evidence of gender differences in information processing. Moreover, this study offers practical insights to practitioners regarding how to design appealing webpages to satisfy consumers of different genders.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-01-2020-0025

This study aims to examine the following issues: whether consumers use a dog’s facial expressions and gaze on a product’s packaging to interpret the emotions of a dog and evaluate product quality and how owner identification with the dog moderates the effect of a dog’s facial expressions on product evaluations.

A field study and three lab experiments were conducted to examine the moderating roles of a dog’s gaze on the product package (Study 1) and owner–dog identification (Study 2) in the effect of facial expressions of a dog on product evaluations.

Results showed that the facial expressions of a dog presented on the product package influenced the perceived mood of a dog and product quality evaluation. The effects of the facial expressions were strengthened when the dog looked at the front. Furthermore, those who were more likely to identify with their dog tended to be more responsive to the dog with a smiling face and evaluated the product quality more positively than those who were less likely to identify with their dog.

Marketing practitioners in the pet industry can use the findings of this study to select and place an appropriate pet image on the product package. Happy facial expressions and the direct gaze of a pet can influence positive evaluations of a product and, as a result, increase the purchase intention. Product managers also can place words, phrases or images on the product package that highlight a dog as an inseparable part of the owner’s everyday life and as a representation of his/her identity. Emphasizing the owner’s dog as an extension of him/herself or a part of his/her identities can encourage the active processing of a dog’s facial expressions on the product package and the positive evaluation of a product.

The present work adds valuable empirical findings to the limited marketing literature for the pet-related industry. The results of the experiments showed how consumers process the facial expressions and gaze of a dog and use them to infer the quality of a product. Furthermore, the findings extend prior literature reporting that dog owners with a greater identification are more likely to humanize their pet dogs and develop empathetic abilities.

Attention is one of the most important factors to affect the academic performance of students. Effectively analyzing students' attention in class can promote teachers' precise teaching and students' personalized learning. To intelligently analyze the students' attention in classroom from the first-person perspective, this paper proposes a fusion model based on gaze tracking and object detection. In particular, the proposed attention analysis model does not depend on any smart equipment.

Given a first-person view video of students' learning, the authors first estimate the gazing point by using the deep space–time neural network. Second, single shot multi-box detector and fast segmentation convolutional neural network are comparatively adopted to accurately detect the objects in the video. Third, they predict the gazing objects by combining the results of gazing point estimation and object detection. Finally, the personalized attention of students is analyzed based on the predicted gazing objects and the measurable eye movement criteria.

A large number of experiments are carried out on a public database and a new dataset that is built in a real classroom. The experimental results show that the proposed model not only can accurately track the students' gazing trajectory and effectively analyze the fluctuation of attention of the individual student and all students but also provide a valuable reference to evaluate the process of learning of students.

The contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows. The analysis of students' attention plays an important role in improving teaching quality and student achievement. However, there is little research on how to automatically and intelligently analyze students' attention. To alleviate this problem, this paper focuses on analyzing students' attention by gaze tracking and object detection in classroom teaching, which is significant for practical application in the field of education. The authors proposed an effectively intelligent fusion model based on the deep neural network, which mainly includes the gazing point module and the object detection module, to analyze students' attention in classroom teaching instead of relying on any smart wearable device. They introduce the attention mechanism into the gazing point module to improve the performance of gazing point detection and perform some comparison experiments on the public dataset to prove that the gazing point module can achieve better performance. They associate the eye movement criteria with visual gaze to get quantifiable objective data for students' attention analysis, which can provide a valuable basis to evaluate the learning process of students, provide useful learning information of students for both parents and teachers and support the development of individualized teaching. They built a new database that contains the first-person view videos of 11 subjects in a real classroom and employ it to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and examine the effect of a celebrity’s eye gaze on self-celebrity connection. A celebrity’s direct (vs averted) eye gaze can be used as a tactic in social media posts to increase self-celebrity connection and behavioral intentions. Examining the effectiveness of a celebrity’s eye gaze is important, as celebrities regularly use social media to manage their brand image and to build a relationship with consumers.

Study 1 examines the effect of a celebrity’s eye gaze (direct vs averted) on self-celebrity connection. Study 2 investigates the role of celebrity authenticity in explaining the effect of a celebrity’s eye gaze on consumer–celebrity brand relationships. Study 3 examines the moderating role of a non-Duchenne smile (fake, social smile) in diluting the effect of a celebrity’s direct eye gaze on self-celebrity connection and the downstream consequences on behavioral intentions.

The findings from Study 1 indicate that a celebrity’s direct (averted) eye gaze strengthens (weakens) self-celebrity connection. Study 2 provides evidence of celebrity authenticity as the explanation for stronger consumer–celebrity connection when a celebrity is featured with a direct eye gaze. The results of Study 3 show that a fake smile in a celebrity’s social media posts can weaken relationships with and behavioral intentions toward celebrities with a direct eye gaze.

This paper is limited, as it focuses only on eye gaze and smiles as non-verbal cues depicted in celebrity images on social media.

This paper has important implications for celebrities, celebrity brand managers (including digital/social media marketing managers and public relations professionals) and advertisers. Celebrities, celebrity brand managers and advertisers should develop social media posts that can strengthen consumer–celebrity relationships and positively influence behaviors toward the celebrity through: 1) ensuring that photographs are taken with the celebrity looking directly into the camera at the target (audience); and 2) avoiding posting images of a celebrity’s direct eye gaze with a non-Duchenne (fake) smile.

This paper introduces and provides evidence of a celebrity’s direct eye gaze–self-celebrity relationship effect. Tactics, such as eye gaze, can strengthen consumer–celebrity relationships, which is crucial in building brand equity and in increasing financial value for the celebrity.

Developing attention-aware systems and interfaces based on eye tracking technology could revolutionize mainstream human–computer interaction to make the interaction between human beings and computers more intuitive, effective and immersive than can be achieved traditionally using a computer mouse. This paper aims to propose an eye-controlled interactive reading system (ECIRS) that uses human eyes instead of the traditional mouse to control digital text to support screen-based digital reading.

This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of an experimental group and a control group of learners who, respectively, used the ECIRS and a mouse-controlled interactive reading system (MCIRS) to conduct their reading of two types of English-language text online – pure text and Q&A-type articles on reading comprehension, cognitive load, technology acceptance, and reading behavioural characteristics. Additionally, the effects of learners with field-independent (FI) and field-dependence (FD) cognitive styles who, respectively, used the ECIRS and MCIRS to conduct their reading of two types of English-language text online – pure text and Q&A-type articles on reading comprehension are also examined.

Analytical results reveal that the reading comprehension of learners in the experimental group significantly exceeded those in the control group for the Q&A article, but the difference was insignificant for the pure text article. Moreover, the ECIRS improved the reading comprehension of field-independent learners more than it did that of field-dependent learners. Moreover, neither the cognitive loads of the two groups nor their acceptance of the technology differed significantly, whereas the reading time of the experimental group significantly exceeded that of the control group. Interestingly, for all articles, the control group of learners read mostly from top to bottom without repetition, whereas most of the learners in the experimental group read most paragraphs more than once. Clearly, the proposed ECIRS supports deeper digital reading than does the MCIRS.

This study proposes an emerging ECIRS that can automatically provide supplementary information to a reader and control a reading text based on a reader’s eye movement to replace the widely used mouse-controlled reading system on a computer screen to effectively support digital reading for English language learning. The implications of this study are that the highly interactive reading patterns of digital text with ECIRS support increase motivation and willingness to learn while giving learners a more intuitive and natural reading experience as well as reading an article online with ECIRS support guides learners’ attention in deeper digital reading than does the MCIRS because of simultaneously integrating perceptual and cognitive processes of selection, awareness and control based on human eye movement.

This paper aims to introduce an unsupervised modular approach for eye centre localisation in images and videos following a coarse-to-fine, global-to-regional scheme. The design of the algorithm aims at excellent accuracy, robustness and real-time performance for use in real-world applications.

A modular approach has been designed that makes use of isophote and gradient features to estimate eye centre locations. This approach embraces two main modalities that progressively reduce global facial features to local levels for more precise inspections. A novel selective oriented gradient (SOG) filter has been specifically designed to remove strong gradients from eyebrows, eye corners and self-shadows, which sabotage most eye centre localisation methods. The proposed algorithm, tested on the BioID database, has shown superior accuracy.

The eye centre localisation algorithm has been compared with 11 other methods on the BioID database and six other methods on the GI4E database. The proposed algorithm has outperformed all the other algorithms in comparison in terms of localisation accuracy while exhibiting excellent real-time performance. This method is also inherently robust against head poses, partial eye occlusions and shadows.

The eye centre localisation method uses two mutually complementary modalities as a novel, fast, accurate and robust approach. In addition, other than assisting eye centre localisation, the SOG filter is able to resolve general tasks regarding the detection of curved shapes. From an applied point of view, the proposed method has great potentials in benefiting a wide range of real-world human-computer interaction (HCI) applications.

Purpose – The advancement of multimedia technology has spurred the use of multimedia in business practice. The adoption of audio and visual data will accelerate as marketing scholars become more aware of the value of audio and visual data and the technologies required to reveal insights into marketing problems. This chapter aims to introduce marketing scholars into this field of research.Design/methodology/approach – This chapter reviews the current technology in audio and visual data analysis and discusses rewarding research opportunities in marketing using these data.Findings – Compared with traditional data like survey and scanner data, audio and visual data provides richer information and is easier to collect. Given these superiority, data availability, feasibility of storage, and increasing computational power, we believe that these data will contribute to better marketing practices with the help of marketing scholars in the near future.Practical implications: The adoption of audio and visual data in marketing practices will help practitioners to get better insights into marketing problems and thus make better decisions.Value/originality – This chapter makes first attempt in the marketing literature to review the current technology in audio and visual data analysis and proposes promising applications of such technology. We hope it will inspire scholars to utilize audio and visual data in marketing research.

Visual animation of sponsorship signage has become a frequently used technique at televised sports with the aim to increase viewer attention. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of animation intensity of sponsorship signage on sport viewers’ attention and to examine viewers’ visual confusion as a reaction to increasing animation intensity.

Based on a lab experiment, eye-tracking methodology was applied to analyze the participants’ visual attention to animated sponsorship signage. The stimulus films showed a highlight video clip of a tennis match and included five different intensity levels of animated signage. The hypothesized causal relationships were tested by using linear regression analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results demonstrate that animation intensity of sponsorship signage positively influences sport viewers’ attention. The findings also reveal that animation intensity has no significant effect on sport viewers’ visual confusion.

The findings suggest the use of higher animation intensity levels for effective sponsorship communication in sports broadcasts. Furthermore, there is still more potential to improve sponsorship communication at televised tennis events as viewer confusion was not affected by animation intensity.

This research contributes to the body of knowledge by taking into account different intensity levels of animated sponsorship signage in a tennis event context. It is the first study that demonstrates the impact of animation intensity to improve sponsorship communication at televised sporting events.

Working memory (WM) is a key component of effective and efficient communication in typical communicators, with, potentially, even greater significance for those who benefit from augmentative communication. This study aims to explore the emergence of WM strategies in children with complex communication needs who may be reliant on aided communication strategies.

A quasi‐experimental repeated measures, multi‐factorial research design, comparing 30 children with complex communication needs (CCN) aged three to six years and 30 age‐matched typically developing peers. Picture stimuli representing verbs and adjectives in three categories: control words, long words and phonologically similar words are presented visually or silently in sequences of increasing length to establish each participant's memory span.

Articulatory rehearsal does not appear to be used as a memory strategy with verb material. With adjective material, there is limited evidence of emerging articulatory rehearsal at age six. Input modality does not influence rehearsal of either verbs or adjectives.

The study is small scale and exploratory, but there are suggestions that both groups of participants handle verb and adjective material differently to noun material.

Emerging WM skill in children with CCN needs to be considered in relation to the use of speech generating technology.

This paper contributes to understanding of the development and potential influence of WM in efficient aided communication.

The objective of this study was to examine the effects of human model backgrounds (concrete backgrounds vs. solid backgrounds) on consumer responses (attention and attitude) and to determine the mechanism and boundary conditions behind such effects.

The research consisted of one eye-tracking experiment and two experimental studies.

The results showed that consumers notice faster and pay more attention to the central figure against solid backgrounds. However, concrete backgrounds elicit more favorable attitudes toward products, and mental imagery mediates the effects of image backgrounds on consumers' attitudes. The authors also found that the situation moderates the relationship between image background and attitude.

The study also supplements the literature on the effects of image backgrounds on consumer responses and the literature on online presentation using human models. Last, the study combines questionnaires with an eye-tracking experiment to obtain a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the results.