Design Perception: Combining Semantic Priming With Eye Tracking and Event-Related Potential (ERP) Techniques to Identify Salient Product Visual Attributes
The study of product visual attributes is usually performed through questionnaires which provide information about the conscious subjective opinions of the consumer. This work complements such method by combining Event-Related Potentials (ERP) and Eye-Tracking (ET) techniques and using semantic priming to elicit user perception. Our study focuses on package design and follows the basic structure of classic ERP experiments where participants are presented an ordered sequence of frames (stimuli) in a computer screen for a certain period of time: attention frame, semantic priming frame (descriptive adjective), neutral background, target frame (product image), and a question regarding coherence between priming and target frames. The eye-tracking system works in combination with the ERP experiment. The results of our study reveal the connection between adjectives (semantic priming) and package design attributes (based on the analysis of the N400 ERP component), and the connection between adjectives and the specific visual elements that get more attention (based on the information provided by eye-tracking analysis software).