Eye tracking outcomes in smoking health warning labels

Abstract

Graphic health warning label is an advertisement approach to promote greater public understanding on negative health consequences of smoking. A large volume of data has accumulated on the issue of cigarette smoking health warning labels recently, as the number of smokers are yet still growing, reaching 1.1 billion people who smoked every day. This rising in number of smokers were predicted to significantly impact the number of cases to increase directly proportional related to critical disease such as heart disease and stroke. Therefore, a comprehensive strategy needs for efficient tobacco control, an informative communication campaign and strategy such as pictorial disease warning label that have been conducted since 2009. However, justification of the current evidence on relative warning labels effectiveness are still questionable. This study therefore targeted to investigate the abilities of warning labels in informing the negative consequences related with cigarette smoking, through the cutting technology of eye tracking. 30 students had completed this experiment including both smokers and non-smokers in order to directly assess on how the eye movements react towards the graphic stimuli using eye tracking method. Tobii TX300 eye tracker were used for data collection, filtration and analysis, as the device were more detailed and proven to be less bias compared to usual verbal report. Which helping in interpreting human behaviour in obtaining subjects attention. The collected data sets were further analysed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique. With the small difference in results of significant value at 2.15 x 10−19 for eye movement event occur between two categories of subjects, shows that their eye activities towards pictorial warning labels are significantly same, as both categories of subjects focused on same part of the image. Pictorial warning labels were believed to be inefficient to continue as a strategy of tobacco control nowadays as the result showed that critical disease images were ineffective in informing the negative consequences related with smoking cessation. The findings indicate that the strategies could be improve besides using pictorial warning labels that have been conducted over a decade.