An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study of Breast-Cancer Screening Ads: A Visual Analytics Framework and Descriptive Atlas

Yfantidou, I ORCID: 0000-0003-3200-2185, Balaskas, S ORCID: 0000-0003-2444-9796 and Skandali, D ORCID: 0009-0008-1728-2821 (2025) An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study of Breast-Cancer Screening Ads: A Visual Analytics Framework and Descriptive Atlas. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 18 (6). p. 64. ISSN 1995-8692

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Abstract

Successful health promotion involves messages that are quickly captured and held long enough to permit eligibility, credibility, and calls to action to be coded. This research develops an exploratory eye-tracking atlas of breast cancer screening ads viewed by midlife women and a replicable pipeline that distinguishes early capture from long-term processing. Areas of Interest are divided into design-influential categories and graphed with two complementary measures: first hit and time to first fixation for entry and a tie-aware pairwise dominance model for dwell that produces rankings and an “early-vs.-sticky” quadrant visualization. Across creatives, pictorial and symbolic features were more likely to capture the first glance when they were perceptually dominant, while layouts containing centralized headlines or institutional cues deflected entry to the message and source. Prolonged attention was consistently focused on blocks of text, locations, and badges of authoring over ornamental pictures, demarcating the functional difference between capture and processing. Subgroup differences indicated audience-sensitive shifts: Older and household families shifted earlier toward source cues, more educated audiences shifted toward copy and locations, and younger or single viewers shifted toward symbols and images. Internal diagnostics verified that pairwise matrices were consistent with standard dwell summaries, verifying the comparative approach. The atlas converts the patterns into design-ready heuristics: defend sticky and early pieces, encourage sticky but late pieces by pushing them toward probable entry channels, de-clutter early but not sticky pieces to convert to processing, and re-think pieces that are neither. In practice, the diagnostics can be incorporated into procurement, pretesting, and briefs by agencies, educators, and campaign managers in order to enhance actionability without sacrificing segmentation of audiences. As an exploratory investigation, this study invites replication with larger and more diverse samples, generalizations to dynamic media, and associations with downstream measures such as recall and uptake of services.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	1113 Opthalmology and Optometry; 1702 Cognitive Sciences; 5202 Biological psychology; 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5001 Business > HF5410 Marketing. Distribution of Products R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Divisions:	Liverpool Business School
Publisher:	MDPI
Date of acceptance:	31 October 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	10 November 2025
Date Deposited:	10 Nov 2025 11:21
Last Modified:	10 Nov 2025 11:30
DOI or ID number:	10.3390/jemr18060064
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27537

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