The Visual Environment and Attention in Decision Making

Visual attention is a fundamental aspect of most everyday decisions, and governments and companies spend vast resources competing for the attention of decision makers. In natural environments, choice options differ on a variety of visual factors, such as salience, position, or surface size. However, most decision theories ignore such visual factors, focusing on cognitive factors such as preferences as determinants of attention. To provide a systematic review of how the visual environment guides attention we meta-analyze 122 effect sizes on eye movements in decision making. A psychometric meta-analysis and Top10 sensitivity analysis show that visual factors play a similar or larger role than cognitive factors in determining attention. The visual factors that most influence attention are positioning information centrally, ρ = .43 (Top10 = .67), increasing the surface size, ρ = .35 (Top10 = .43), reducing the set size of competing information elements, ρ = .24 (Top10 = .24), and increasing visual salience, ρ = .13 (Top10 = .24). Cognitive factors include attending more to preferred choice options and attributes, ρ = .36 (Top10 = .31), effects of task instructions on attention, ρ = .35 (Top10 = .21), and attending more to the ultimately chosen option, ρ = .59 (Top10 = .26). Understanding real-world decision making will require the integration of both visual and cognitive factors in future theories of attention and decision making. Public Significance StatementVisual attention in decision making is influenced by the relevance of information and by how information is presented, that is, by visual factors like the position, salience, and size of information and the number of competing information elements. We show that how information is presented is more important to attention than the relevance of the information. Policymakers and companies can leverage visual factors to mislead or guide our attention to information that enhances welfare supporting behaviors.