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Guest Lecture: Communication Research in Augmented Reality and Restaurant Reviews

Introduction

Are you all in the first semester?

, first or second semester should be here.

Right.

Second.

Okay, .

So today Anna asked me to give you the class and they took, not to be really a lecture, but rather I will present you some studies.

I'll present you many studies that I did during my PhD and one proposal that we submitted for try to get somebody to conduct the study.

So submit like this week.

They are related to food.

somehow to communication as well.

I mean, they are related to communication.

My PhD was in marketing, in neuromarketing.

It was not specifically in food, but these studies, they were related to food.

Here I work as a postdoc in the same work in Europe as Anna, so socioeconomics of sustainable nutrition, and we work with food choices, health and sustainable food choices.

You can.

And you should interrupt me if you have questions.

So just raise your hand or start speaking.

I don't really mind.

Sorry, did you say neuromarketing?

What's that?

It's a combination of neuroscience, psychology, and marketing.

And may I ask, like, what was your bachelor's and master's studies?

Yes, my bachelor was food engineering.

Nothing related at all.

So it's pure engineering, but applied to the food industry.

I did an MBA as well, and then I worked for years in a chocolate factory and in the retailing sector.

And then I went back to academia and I did a master's in neuroeconomics.

So it's economics and neuroscience.

I also learned psychology with behavioral economics.

And then my master's was in a European project, Verizon 2020, so I could travel around Europe with many partners, including a neuromarketing company.

And my area was advertising.

So I worked with marketing, more related to advertising, branding, these kind of things.

And then we used some neural marketing tools.

The studies I'll show you, we did use some tools, mainly like writing.

As I told you, there are three studies.

I don't know how much time I will pay to them.

I'm not knowing that.

It's just for you to have an idea of how is research, which kinds of studies are done.

Hello, welcome.

Hi.

So as I was telling our colleagues, whenever you have a question or a doubt, you just raise your hand or start speaking.

And I'm not really giving a proper lecture, but rather we present you some studies, scientific studies.

Study 1: Visual Attention to Social Media Cues (TripAdvisor Restaurant Pages)

This first study is already published.

We published in 2022, as far as I remember, yes.

And it's related to visual attention to social media cues.

And by social media, here we use TripAdvisor because we use the restaurants.

And we wanted to see how the attention to these cues, I will tell you what were these cues,.

They impact the intention to visit the restaurant and they impact how much you think you would like that restaurant.

For this study, we used self-reported data.

So self-reported data is basically questions, questionnaires where people say things or answer to questions.

But we also used eye tracking.

So this little eyes to symbolize eye tracking.

I did my.

PhD in Spain.

That's why my affiliation here is University of Valencia.

I'll just explain very briefly with what eye tracking is, because I don't know who a few knows what eye tracking is.

Eye Tracking Overview

Nobody?

No more or less?

No?

Don't you say something?

Only if you want, otherwise just go ahead.

, from I understand you're checking the eye movement of people that, , are, , maybe it's a camera, what are they called, the augmented reality?

You can use with virtual reality as well, I'll show you, but in general it's exactly what you said, it's for tracking where you are looking at, so you can capture.

How you are looking at something, for how long, what did you see at first?

All these metrics you can capture.

There are several types of eye-trackers.

There are the ones that are screen-based, so they are fixed.

You put below a monitor or the screen of the laptop.

There are now solutions that you can use the webcam.

of the computer and can do online studies, eye tracking with the own webcam of the person or the webcam of the phone as well.

There are these portable eye trackers.

This is very cool.

So these glasses, they have a little camera that sees what you are looking at.

And then you can do like field studies.

You can take someone to a supermarket and then you put the glasses, you'll know how the people, what they are looking at, what catches attention, what does not catch attention.

And some VR headsets, they have eye tracker embedded on it.

This is one of them.

It's the HTC Vive Pro.

So all of these are from my pictures, so from our studies, except this one.

And this one I didn't use, but another personal use in our lab.

So basically, the camera sends an infrared light, and then this light enters your pupil, reaches your cornea, and get back the reflection.

So it is reflected by the back of your eye, and then the software calculates the distance between the sending and the reflection, and then it shows where you are looking at.

This is not the case for webcams.

For webcams, there is no infrared light, and then this is mainly due to the position of your eyes.

That's why it's not so precise.

Webcam eye tracking is not as precise as the.

standard eye trackers.

But you can use for eye images.

People who are in the behavior economics class this morning, they saw not this image, but I saw another one.

But please don't help your colleagues.

But this is one of the cool things that you can see with eye tracking that you cannot see if you ask someone.

If you give, for example, advertising to someone, this ad, it's.

So, you deny the colors, okay?

I'll explain the colors later.

Who are the respondents to take your data?

Whatever you want.

If you have money, you can collect data from the general population, so you hire the market receipt with the eye trackers.

Like, do you mandatory need the eye tracker to collect the data?

You need a device, so you bring people to the lab, for example.

Okay.

Or if you do online studies, you can use the webcam of the person.

But then there are many restrictions on what you can.

But using the webcam without people's consent?

No, you have to ask for consent.

All the studies people have to consent and sign a consent form.

So they are aware their eyes, their eyes movements.

, they know, they know, they know, they always know.

You need to have a software.

There are online solutions, so there are providers for these online softwares.

And then the person has to do a calibration, which you have to do a calibration anyway for all the eye trackers.

The calibration consists of a dot moving, and you have to follow the dot with your eyes.

Then it...

As the software knows where the dot is moving and you should be following, it starts matching the gaze and then do a deliberation.

And then you start using, there is no, there is actually no issue at all.

It's everything online.

It's, , it's quite cool.

I never did an online one because it's quite expensive and we never had a project for an online one.

What does the same logic as the lab?

It was only based on Spain or globally.

This one was only in Spain because it was, I mean, this is not my study.

I'll just present my study.

Age length of the respondents.

As you wish.

So in our case, we collected from the general population.

We hired a company who has a panel, people who register in this company for giving, for participating in studies, and then we collect from 18 to 60.

But the result cannot be biased because they already know how they're ready.

But all these studies are different, right?

And then it does not mean that they participate A lot.

It's more or less the same as here in the econ lab.

You know, here we have the economics lab where you can do studies.

However, you must speak German to register.

And then you can get invited for studies.

And for sure, there are people who are super experienced.

You can know this beforehand and then depends on the type of study you might not want to invite them.

But in studies like this that you just want to see where people look at, this is very instinctive and it doesn't matter if you have experience or not in answering a survey.

No, this is just natural human behavior.

So with eye tracking, what they found, you have an ad of diapers.

And if you would ask a person, where are you looking at in this ad?

the person say everywhere, right?

I mean, I look at the paper, I look at the diapers, blah, blah, blah.

But only asking, you cannot know where they look at most.

And that is, I think, if I know, these colors representing how much and for how long a person looks at.

The red, reddish colors, they are more intensive, so more,.

more time looking at or more gaze or more fixation, and lighter colors are less, and no colors is that there was no representative, not enough people looking at that place.

So here, if you would be this brand, the brand is here, would you think that the ad is good?

That's not good, right?

Where people are looking at?

the baby face.

At the baby face.

You are not selling the baby, correct?

The company is not selling the baby.

The company is selling the diapers and you want them to look at your brand because when you are at the supermarket or pharmacy or whatever you buy, baby shop, you will find that brand and you buy the brand.

So they made a slight tweak and now the baby is looking.

at the text is looking at the direction of where what people should look at.

And then you can see there's now people look at the brand, people read the text.

Otherwise, the text was almost useless.

You see?

And this kind of data, it's not possible to gather if you just ask people where they are looking at.

Therefore, we need to reuse this equipment.

So this was just to explain you what is eye tracking.

We used the very same tool for our study that was with TripAdvisor and why we did this study.

So we knew beforehand that you have two types of contents, user-generated content and firm-generated content.

User-generated content is the content that people generate.

In our case, in TripAdvisor ratings, you evaluate a result.

A firm-generated content is.

things posted by the company.

For example, the pictures of the restaurant at the top is almost always posted by the company.

Some of them allow pictures of the users, but not really.

We know from previous literature that both types of content, they do influence purchases or attitudes towards something.

What we didn't know is whether they would influence differently or how much the influence.

How much you look at a certain content would influence your, how much you think you'd like that restaurant, for example, or, and how much you'd be willing to go to that restaurant.

And that's why we did this study.

So we did a lab study.

So we brought people to the lab.

We had a night tracker one by one.

And we had 128 participants.

And then we think subjects design.

Do you know what is within between subjects design?

Have you heard about it?

This is really research terminology.

So between subjects design is, let's say you have a control condition and a treatment condition.

I want to test whether the NutriScore leads to more healthier purchases.

One group I show the products with NutriScore, one group I show the products with NutriScore, independent groups.

This is between subjects.

Within subjects is when the participants go through all the conditions.

In this case, we did a within subjects design.

Participants go through all the conditions of the experiment.

This has lots of advantages, but also disadvantages.

Big advantage is the same person going through all the conditions.

So you kind of eliminate these interpersonal differences.

You are different from me.

Correct.

You could be in the NutriScar group.

I'm not.

And I would purchase something just because I have a preference for whatever product and you have another preference.

That's why you need lots of people.

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