Eye Tracking Myths: Why Looking Isn't Seeing #shorts

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]There's another reason I'm critical of eye tracking. And that's because just because we someone is looking at something doesn't mean they paid attention to it. I mean I this I call the refrigerator effect. Like how many of you have ever opened up the refrigerator and said, "Where's the ketchup? Can't find the ketchup." And your spouse your roommate comes behind you and says, "You were looking right at it." And you go, "Oh, oh, there it is."

[00:00:22]And you were. Now if you had been wearing eye tracking glasses, it would have shown that you were looking right at the ketchup. So you looked at it and you saw it, but you weren't paying attention to it. We cannot assume that just because someone looked at something and their eyes were gazing at it, that their brain paid attention. And that's one of the problems I have with eye tracking. So you got to be very careful.

[00:00:46]Certainly you can say that people's their their central vision was looking at that image, but that's pretty much all you can say. And I get kind of perturbed when people then start making decisions about the webpage design and well, let's get rid of this. No one looked at it and you know, and I say, "Yeah, but it was in peripheral vision."

[00:01:04]And they go, "Huh?" So now you can also be a very popular person with your eye tracking people. You can go and tell talk to them about this. All right.