Hot and Cold Visual Selective Acuity
Eric Shanks · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2011
Hot and Cold Visual Selective Acuity happens when a visual image affectively influences viewer behavior. This research extends earlier work demonstrating that visual behavior is context dependent (See Yarbus 1967 and Baron-Cohen 1995) and recent work by Dodd, Hibbing and Smith 2009 who found evidence showing that political orientation may influence human gaze behavior. Data will be gathered and analyzed from individual eye scan topographies. Search strategies will be analyzed via four main criteria; Scan-path total distance, modal focal point/resting gaze frequency, text sentence attention span (scan/read), return point frequency (most viewed space). This paper theorizes that eye scan search patterns contain predictable involuntary similarities based on political context. Specifically, this research tests whether politically conservative viewers and politically liberal viewers demonstrate different visual behavior under the same affectively charged viewing conditions.