Eye Tracking: Making the Right Decisions

Right or left. Up or down. Now or later. This or that. Life is filled with endless choices and countless decisions, and in this information age, it’s only getting more difficult to select between options. And a recent study published in the Wesleyan University’s newsletter, Andrea Patalano, Associate Professor of Psychology, and Barbara Juhasz, Assistant Professor of Psychology, used eye tracking technology to study how individuals make decisions. Their theory? To determine the difference between a decisive and indecisive person, their eye movements need to be followed.

It comes down to information processing. With the full findings scheduled to be published soon, Patalano and Juhasz are quite excited about what they have found. Until now, research had suggested that indecisive people end up using more information when trying to make a decision compared to indecisive individuals, but these findings had been yet to be published in scientific literature.

The researchers had 54 students from Wesleyan complete a hypothetical course selection activity that was organized into a grid, while an eye tracker documented the participants’ eye movement every millisecond as each task was completed. For the project, Juhasz used an EyeLink 1000 eye tracking machine created by SR Research, a Canadian company specializing in eye tracking solutions.The students were told to imagine they needed to select a final course for their class studies, with each course fitting into their already selected schedule. Five courses were presented to each student, and the courses varied based on meeting time, quality of the instructor, amount of work, usefulness for goals and interest in topic. The students were only allowed to pick one course, all of which were close in quality ratings, after which, they would rate themselves on their own level of indecisiveness.

The experiment showed a difference in the way people scan information. More decisive people seemed to narrow down their decision based on a particular attribute, while those deemed more indecisive tended to take in all of the information before choosing, noting that the observed information had some good qualities and some bad ones. Decisive participants tended to see the good and bad, but were able to make a decision based on the quality they deemed most important, be it meeting time, instructor quality, and so on.

One of the most significant findings was that the indecisive students tended to divide their time over a greater number of choices, often staring at the spaces between the choices while they tried to make a decision. According to the article, the researchers were not sure why indecisive individuals spent more time staring at the blank spaces, but thought that doing so allowed for more time for them to think.

Perhaps eye tracking results could help with the decision making process as the world grows more complex, teaching lessons on how to prioritize and approach any decision more efficiently and more effectively.

Eye-Tracking Study Reveals How People Make Decisions

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