Visual evaluation of health warning cues in anti smoking PSAs images

Abstract

Visual stimuli are a significant part of our daily experience, it is an open issue which one are able to catch our attention or interest. In the present study, we aimed to better understand how an anti-smoking Public Service Announcement (PSA) can gain this focus of attention by the mean of an eye tracker device during the vision of a series of PSAs. We propose here a non-dimensional index of Visual Interest (VI) that can describe the visual pattern of 40 subject (divided based on their age), highlighting if an Area Of Interest (AOI) is salient or not in the stimuli proposed. We selected 3 PSAs images that contain a health warning related to smoking habits (such as a tracheostomy, or guy in the act of coughing). The results of the analysis showed a significant enhancement of VI in the AOI with a strong health warning message (tracheostomy), irrespective of the dimension of the AOI taken into account (p < 0.01); in particular, this hold true for the adult sample population. The VI index proposed here, therefore represents a good estimator of the importance of an AOI inside an image.