Use of ocular vergence as a biomarker of the response to the variation of beverages taste

Abstract

Nowadays, eye-tracking technology has become a major tool for attention analysis applied in neuromarketing. It is necessary to understand cognitive responses to the final product in order to understand consumer preferences. A simple and non-invasive way to analyze these cognitive responses is through eye movement tracking. These techniques have been used in various fields, both medical, in the diagnosis of diseases and rehabilitation, as well as for more business-related aspects such as marketing, virtual reality, etc. The aim of the project is to see if it is possible to observe the impact of beverage components on consumer behavior from eye movement analysis. In this way, to be able to propose the most suitable taste for the impact on the consumer. The trial was carried out at the eye-tracking laboratory of the University of Barcelona. Thirty- four subjects aged of 19-20 years approximatively participated and had to sit in front of a computer screen while the experimenter gave them the drinks. When they took a sip, the screen presented a fixation point and then offered them two images to look at. During this time, the data is analyzed with the eye tracker connected to the screen. Three aspects of ocular data were analyzed: cognitive vergence, pupil size and gaze fixation points. With these data it has been possible to obtain an average reaction between all the trials of all the subjects to each drink. From these results it is understood that people fixate more intensely on images related to the type of beverage they drink. It has been clearly seen that the pupillary response differs when presenting gustatory stimuli, while the differences at the level of cognitive vergence seem to be more related to an increase in concentration when drinking beverages and analyzing the images. Although differences at the pupillary and vergence levels are seen between beverage type, the differences are not significant enough to confirm these observations.