Study On Visual Attention Behavior And Propagation Effect Of COVID-19 News Posters Based On Eye Tracking

Against the background of the global COVID-19 pandemic,timely and efficient dissemination of prevention and control knowledge by government agencies and mainstream media helps to enhance public self-protection awareness and curb the spread of the epidemic.As an important form of communication,news posters play an active role in popularizing epidemic prevention knowledge due to their advantages in visualization and prominent content themes.Therefore,there has been a significant increase in the number of research papers on news posters during the pandemic period.Visuals are the first channel for receiving information,and there are currently few studies on the COVID-19 image information dissemination effects based on eye tracking.Analyzing the audience’s visual attention behavior towards images can better understand which information users pay more attention to concerning the epidemic,thereby promoting the popularization of epidemic prevention knowledge and improving users’ self-health management awareness.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct research on news posters containing epidemic prevention knowledge.This study aims to improve the dissemination effectiveness of COVID-19 posters by analyzing the audience’s visual attention behavior towards news posters containing COVID-19 information,understanding their focus and behavior,and further providing research insights for future public health emergencies in terms of news poster content presentation.The information frame can influence people’s decisions by expressing the gain or loss of a certain behavior,and the gain frame emphasizes the benefits of engaging in a certain behavior,while the loss frame emphasizes the loss of not engaging in a certain behavior.It is widely used in the health communication field.News posters present news facts in poster form,which is both a form of textual information as well as a form of visual information.This study adopts a between-subject experimental design of gain or loss frame,attempting to explore the dissemination effectiveness of different frames and obtain the public’s visual attention with eye tracking technology based on the memory effect of news posters of different frames.This can help to discuss how to make news posters more effective during the pandemic.Combining eye-tracking data,memory-effect data,and questionnaire survey data from 66 valid subjects,the study can draw the following conclusions:the information frame effect plays an evident role when the public browses news posters related to the epidemic;when the news poster text uses the loss frame in the information frame,the total gaze time of readers will be longer,but the public’s memory of the content of news posters under the gain frame is better.This indicates that the express of gain or loss frame will affect the public’s browsing of news posters concerning epidemic content.In the future propaganda work,government-related departments can consider using information frames more to promote public attention to epidemic prevention and control,enabling self-protection,and stopping the spread of the epidemic.