Information Cues Research Articles

Cognitive load during planned and unplanned virtual shopping: Evidence from a neurophysiological perspective

Rapid adoption of virtual-reality-assisted retail applications is inadvertently reshaping consumer buying patterns, making it crucial for businesses to enhance their shopping experience. This new scenario challenges marketers with unique hurdles in both the commercialization of products and in managing information cues derived via VR retailing. Therefore, this study examined consumers’ impulsive behavior and unplanned purchases in a virtual retail store, using self-reports and electroencephalography. Borrowing assorted perspectives from retailing, virtual reality, and neuromarketing literature, we extended the stimulus-organism-response framework to evaluate how unplanned behavior evolves through conscious and unconscious measures. We found that consumers’ impulsiveness was significantly associated with their unplanned expenditure and the number of unplanned purchases. Using mediation analysis, we observed that flow experience during shopping partially mediated the relationship between the sense of presence and the desire to stay longer in a virtual shopping store. Desire to stay in the virtual store positively influenced store satisfaction, basket-size deviation, and budget deviation. Additionally, cognitive workload obtained via electroencephalogram revealed significant differences during both planned and unplanned purchases. These findings provide fresh opportunities for retailers to leverage the disruptive potential of immersive and interactive virtual technology to transform consumer shopping experiences.

Informational vs. emotional B2B firm-generated-content on social media engagement: Computerized visual and textual content analysis

While social media marketing plays an increasingly significant role in the B2B context, there is still limited research examining how to increase B2B social media engagement. The need for more research is becoming more pressing given the recent shift in social media content from text-centric to image-oriented experience. Building on the elaboration likelihood model and employing computerized visual and textual analysis tools, the present research investigates how informational and emotional cues in B2B social media content influence viewer engagement. By analyzing 5362 single-image posts from the Instagram accounts of 10 B2B companies across five industries, this research demonstrates that informational cues are more effective than emotional cues in driving viewer engagement, and that informational cues are even more effective when presented in visual content, as compared to textual content. The findings of this research contribute to the literature on B2B social media literature and offer managerial implications for B2B social media marketing.

Role of the plant-specific calcium-binding C2-DOMAIN ABSCISIC ACID-RELATED (CAR) protein family in environmental signaling

Many signaling processes rely on information decoding at the plasma membrane, and membrane-associated proteins and their complexes are fundamental for regulating this process. Still many questions exist as to how protein complexes are assembled and function at membrane sites to change identity and dynamics of membrane systems. Peripheral membrane proteins containing a calcium and phospholipid-binding C2-domain can act in membrane-related signaling by providing a tethering function so that protein complexes form. C2 domain proteins termed C2-DOMAIN ABSCISIC ACID-RELATED (CAR) proteins are plant-specific, and the functional relevance of this C2 domain protein subgroup is just emerging. The ten Arabidopsis CAR proteins CAR1 to CAR10 have a single C2 domain with a plant-specific insertion, the so-called “CAR-extra-signature” or also termed “sig domain”. Via this “sig domain” CAR proteins can bind signaling protein complexes of different kinds and act in biotic and abiotic stress, blue light and iron nutrition. Interestingly, CAR proteins can oligomerize in membrane microdomains, and their presence in the nucleus can be linked with nuclear protein regulation. This shows that CAR proteins may play unprecedented roles in coordinating environmental responses and assembling required protein complexes to transmit information cues between plasma membrane and nucleus. The aim of this review is to summarize structure-function characteristics of the CAR protein family and assemble findings from CAR protein interactions and physiological functions. From this comparative investigation we extract common principles about the molecular operations that CAR proteins may fulfill in the cell. We also deduce functional properties of the CAR protein family based on its evolution and gene expression profiles. We highlight open questions and suggest novel avenues to prove and understand the functional networks and roles played by this protein family in plants.

The modulation of expectation violation on attention: Evidence from the spatial cueing effects

The study sought to investigate whether and how expectation violation can modulate attention using the exogenous spatial cueing paradigm, under the theoretical framework of the Memory Encoding Cost (MEC) model. The MEC proposes that exogenous spatial cueing effects are mainly driven by a combination of two distinct mechanisms: attentional facilitation triggered by the presence of an abrupt cue, and attentional suppression induced by memory encoding of the cue. In current experiments, participants needed to identify a target letter that was sometimes preceded by a peripheral onset cue. Various types of expectation violation were introduced by regulating the probability of cue presentation (Experiments 1 & 5), the probability of cue location (Experiments 2 & 4), and the probability of irrelevant sound presentation (Experiment 3). The results showed that expectation violation could enhance the cueing effect (valid vs. invalid cue) in some cases. More crucially, all experiments consistently observed asymmetrical modulation of expectation violation on the cost (invalid vs. neutral cue) and benefit (valid vs. neutral cue) effects: Expectation violation increased the cost effects while did not modulate or decreased (or even reversed) the benefit effects. Furthermore, Experiment 5 provided direct evidence that violation of expectations could enhance the memory encoding of a cue (e.g., color) and this memory advantage could manifest quickly in the early stages of the experiment. The MEC better explains these findings than some traditional models like the spotlight: Expectation violation can both enhance the attentional facilitation of the cue and memory encoding of irrelevant cue information. These findings suggest that expectation violation has a general adaptive function in modulating the attention selectivity.

Whose emotion matters? Speaking activity localisation without prior knowledge

The task of emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) benefits from the availability of multiple modalities, as provided, for example, in the video-based Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD). However, only a few research approaches use both acoustic and visual information from the MELD videos. There are two reasons for this: First, label-to-video alignments in MELD are noisy, making those videos an unreliable source of emotional speech data. Second, conversations can involve several people in the same scene, which requires the localisation of the utterance source. In this paper, we introduce MELD with Fixed Audiovisual Information via Realignment (MELD-FAIR) by using recent active speaker detection and automatic speech recognition models, we are able to realign the videos of MELD and capture the facial expressions from speakers in 96.92% of the utterances provided in MELD. Experiments with a self-supervised voice recognition model indicate that the realigned MELD-FAIR videos more closely match the transcribed utterances given in the MELD dataset. Finally, we devise a model for emotion recognition in conversations trained on the realigned MELD-FAIR videos, which outperforms state-of-the-art models for ERC based on vision alone. This indicates that localising the source of speaking activities is indeed effective for extracting facial expressions from the uttering speakers and that faces provide more informative visual cues than the visual features state-of-the-art models have been using so far. The MELD-FAIR realignment data, and the code of the realignment procedure and of the emotional recognition, are available at https://github.com/knowledgetechnologyuhh/MELD-FAIR.

Ethnonationalist Gender Norms: How Parties Shape Voter Attitudes toward Female Candidates in India

AbstractHow do parties in multiethnic societies shape voter attitudes toward female candidates? We address this question, focusing on parties with ideologies that contain ethnonationalist gender norms—patriarchal norms applied to women from an ethnonationalist party's core ethnic constituency. We argue that, while these norms appeal to an ethnonationalist party's base, they also provide informational cues to the party's “non‐core” voters that undermine their support for the party's “core” female candidates. Evidence from an original conjoint survey experiment in the Indian state of Bihar supports our argument; upper‐caste female candidates suffer a support penalty when they are affiliated with the national ruling party, whose ideology prescribes ethnonationalist gender norms targeting its core Hindu upper‐caste constituency. This penalty, we show, is driven by the party's non‐core voters. Our results, which we further bolster using real‐world electoral data, illuminate when and how ethnonationalist gender norms disadvantage elite female candidates.

Acceptance of service robots: a meta-analysis in the hospitality and tourism industry

ABSTRACT Robot services have become an essential competitive differentiator in the hospitality and tourism industry. Seminal studies indicate the need for more profound knowledge about the factors that can increase the acceptance of service robots. This paper investigates the relationship between informational cues and acceptance of service robots through a meta-analysis. Our study also analyzes the acceptance of service robots through contextual characteristics moderators. The results showed that perceived robot trust influences the relationship between informational cues (anthropomorphism and social influence) and acceptance of service robots. By analyzing previous studies, our framework demonstrates that acceptance of service robots has increased more after the COVID pandemic than before the COVID pandemic. Furthermore, the relationship between attitude toward robots and robot usage intention tends to be greater in humanoid service robots (than social robots) and analytical intelligence (than mechanical intelligence).

Research on the Design of Virtual Reality Online Education Information Presentation Based on Multi-Sensory Cognition

The popularity of the online teaching model increased during the COVID-19, and virtual reality online education is now firmly established as a future trend in educational growth. Human–computer interaction and collaboration between virtual models and physical entities, as well as virtual multi-sensory cognition, have become the focus of research in the field of online education. In this paper, we analyze the mapping form of teaching information and cue information on users’ cognition through an experimental system and investigate the effects of the presentation form of online virtual teaching information, the length of the material, users’ memory of the information, and the presentation form of information cues on users’ cognitive performance. The experimental results show that different instructional information and cue presentation designs have significant effects on users’ learning performance, with relatively longer instructional content being more effective and users being more likely to mechanically remember the learning materials. By studying the impact of multi-sensory information presentation on users’ cognition, the output design of instructional information can be optimized, cognitive resources can be reasonably allocated, and learning effectiveness can be ensured, which is of great significance for virtual education research in digital twins.

The formalization of the Egyptian informal sector: a behavioral and experimental approach

PurposeThis paper aims at assessing the impact of a number of behavioral interventions on the willingness of informal businesses, in the Egyptian informal sector, to join the formal sector.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses an experimental methodology to examine the impact of behavioral interventions on the formalization of the Egyptian informal sector. Specifically, it conducts a survey experiment on a total of 240 informal businesses, operating in the Egyptian informal sector. The primary data collected from the survey experiment is then analyzed using a binary logistic regression to assess the impact of the behavioral primes on the probability of joining the formal market.FindingsThe empirical findings of the survey experiment indicate that the biggest obstacle facing informal businesses is finding a formal source of finance that could help them in penetrating the market. Providing informal businesses with information on funding opportunities offered by the ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) significantly increased the probability of joining the formal sector to benefit from this opportunity.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to apply behavioral primes, in the form of informational cues, to the Egyptian case of informal business owners. Previous research on the use of behavioral nudges and primes has focused mainly on the western economies.

Dopamine differentially modulates medial temporal lobe activity and behavior during spatial navigation in young and older adults

Aging is associated with changes in spatial navigation behavior. In addition to an overall performance decline, older adults tend to rely more on proximal location cue information than on environmental boundary information during spatial navigation compared to young adults. The fact that older adults are more susceptible to errors during spatial navigation might be partly attributed to deficient dopaminergic modulation of hippocampal and striatal functioning. Hence, elevating dopamine levels might differentially modulate spatial navigation and memory performance in young and older adults. In this work, we administered levodopa (L-DOPA) in a double-blind within-subject, placebo-controlled design and recorded functional neuroimaging while young and older adults performed a 3D spatial navigation task in which boundary geometry or the position of a location cue were systematically manipulated. An age by intervention interaction on the neural level revealed an upregulation of brain responses in older adults and a downregulation of responses in young adults within the medial temporal lobe (including hippocampus and parahippocampus) and brainstem, during memory retrieval. Behaviorally, L-DOPA had no effect on older adults’ overall memory performance; however, older adults whose spatial memory improved under L-DOPA also showed a shift towards more boundary processing under L-DOPA. In young adults, L-DOPA induced a decline in spatial memory performance in task-naïve participants. These results are consistent with the inverted-U-shaped hypothesis of dopamine signaling and cognitive function and suggest that increasing dopamine availability improves hippocampus-dependent place learning in some older adults.

Informational and emotional appeals of cover image in crowdfunding platforms and the moderating role of campaign outputs

The first-stage decision is critical in the decision process in crowdfunding, where the cover image plays an important role in forming first impressions and persuading click funders. This study explores how emotional visual cues (human face) and informational visual cues (visual text) in the cover image affect funders' decisions and how the effects differ across campaigns. The results demonstrate the great persuasive power of human faces and visual text. We further illustrate the effects of joyful expressions and image-text congruency as well as the non-significant influence of the length and polarity of visual text. Moreover, emotional visual cues are more effective in intangible product campaigns, while informational visual cues are more effective in tangible product campaigns, and both are important in social service campaigns. Valuable insight is provided to creators about the design of the cover image.

Two Oscillatory Correlates of Attention Control in the Alpha-Band with Distinct Consequences on Perceptual Gain and Metacognition.

Behavioral consequences and neural underpinnings of visuospatial attention have long been investigated. Classical studies using the Posner paradigm have found that visual perception systematically benefits from the use of a spatially informative cue pointing to the to-be-attended spatial location, compared with a noninformative cue. Lateralized α amplitude modulation during visuospatial attention shifts has been suggested to account for such perceptual gain. However, recent studies on spontaneous fluctuations of prestimulus α amplitude have challenged this notion. These studies showed that spontaneous fluctuations of prestimulus α amplitude were associated with the subjective appreciation of stimulus occurrence, while objective accuracy was instead best predicted by the frequency of α oscillations, with faster prestimulus α frequency accounting for better perceptual performance. Here, in male and female humans, by using an informative cue in anticipation of lateralized stimulus presentation, we found that the predictive cue not only modulates preparatory α amplitude but also α frequency in a retinotopic manner. Behaviorally, the cue significantly impacted subjective performance measures (metacognitive abilities [meta-d']) and objective performance gain (d'). Importantly, α amplitude directly accounted for confidence levels, with ipsilateral synchronization and contralateral desynchronization coding for high-confidence responses. Crucially, the contralateral α amplitude selectively predicted interindividual differences in metacognitive abilities (meta-d'), thus anticipating decision strategy and not perceptual sensitivity, probably via excitability modulations. Instead, higher perceptual accuracy both within and across participants (d') was associated with faster contralateral α frequency, likely by implementing higher sampling at the attended location. These findings provide critical new insights into the neural mechanisms of attention control and its perceptual consequences.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Prior knowledge serves the anticipation of sensory input to reduce sensory ambiguity. The growing interest in the neural mechanisms governing the integration of sensory input into our internal representations has highlighted a pivotal role of brain oscillations. Here we show that distinct but interacting oscillatory mechanisms are engaged during attentional deployment: one relying on α amplitude modulations and reflecting internal decision processes, associated with subjective perceptual experience and metacognitive abilities; the other relying on α frequency modulations and enabling mechanistic sampling of the sensory input at the attended location to influence objective performance. These insights are crucial for understanding how we reduce sensory ambiguity to maximize the efficiency of our conscious experience, but also in interpreting the mechanisms of atypical perceptual experiences.

Consumers' Acceptance, Emotions, and Responsiveness to Informational Cues for Air-Fried Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) Skin Chips.

Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) skins, as filleting byproduct, were developed into a crispy snack food via air-frying. Consumers rated catfish skin chips (CSC) across sensory modalities (9-point hedonic scales, a just-about-right scale, and "yes/no" for purchase intent, PI) for Plain-, Lemon & Pepper-, and Barbecue-flavored samples during two consumer studies (N = 115 each). Paprika- flavored CSC were excluded from Study 2 due to inferior acceptance and emotional ratings. CSC-elicited emotions were evaluated using a 25-term lexicon with CATA (Check-All-That-Apply) scaling (Study 1) and refined with an abbreviated lexicon containing food-evoked sensation-seeking emotions (5-point intensity scale). The two consumer studies differed in delivery format of product benefit information (a health/protein message and a food waste/sustainability message). Presenting two separate cues (Study 1) significantly increased overall liking (by 0.5 units) and PI (by 15%) for CSC compared to a single integrated message (Study 2), perhaps due to consumers' mode of information processing. Magnitude of increases was less for Barbeque CSC despite performing best overall (overall liking reaching 6.62 and PI reaching 61.7%). CSC generated mostly positive emotions, and informational cues increased sensation-seeking feelings, which can motivate trial of new foods. Accordingly, acceptance of CSC improved for 25 repeat-exposure consumers who participated in both Studies 1 and 2. In combination, sensory, cognitive, and emotional data showed favorable responses for flavored CSC as an appropriate application of this seafood byproduct.

AARN: Anchor‐guided attention refinement network for inshore ship detection

AbstractInshore ship detection is an important task in several fields, for example, maritime transportation, maritime supervision, and port management. However, due to the diversified categories and locations of different ships and interference of complex surroundings, capturing discriminative characteristics of multi‐scale inshore ships for accurate detection is still challenging. Here, an anchor‐guided attention refinement network (AARN) is proposed to alleviate the problems by prominently designing an attention feature filter module (AFFM) and an anchor‐guided alignment detection module (AADM). In AFFM, of which the attention supervision generated from high‐level semantic features, is used to highlight informative target cues and suppress background interference when establishing a four‐layer feature pyramid. In AADM, the anchor‐aligned features are adopted to eventually identify potential inshore ships, which both alleviates misalignment between refined anchors and pyramidal features and improves the performance further. Extensive experiments conducted on the public Seaships7000 dataset verify the contributions of the proposed modules and the effectiveness of our method for detecting multi‐scale inshore ships in comparison to both domain‐specific and general CNN‐based methods.

No Slogan versus with Slogan: The Different Message Strategies for New Product Digital Video Ads

ABSTRACT Purpose Interestingly, some new product digital video ads use slogans, while some do not. This study aims to identify the similarities and differences between the message strategy elements used in two types of new product video advertisements (no slogan vs. slogan). In addition, it attempts to examine how product innovation newness may moderate the influence of video advertising (no slogan vs. slogan) on the presentation frequency of various elements of the message strategy. Methodology/Approach This study employed content analysis method to confirm the special features of the message strategy for the digital video ads. 1070 digital video advertisements of six technology-driven companies’ new products published on the YouTube website’s corporate accounts in the two-year period from 2018–2019 were collected. Findings This study clarified the ambiguous relationship between message strategy and creative strategy and confirmed the theoretical framework of an advertising message strategy. The results of a content analysis revealed that the presentation frequency of elements of the message strategies for the two types of new product digital video ads (no slogan vs. slogan) were significantly different and confirmed the moderation effect of the product innovation newness. Research Implications Extant literature has mostly confirmed the theoretical value and practical significance of advertising slogans. However, there are few studies on advertising message strategies with or without slogans. Our research attempts to provide a theoretical basis for new product video advertising message strategies with or without advertising slogans. Practical Implications When designing video ad copy, advertisers should have the awareness of integrating the four elements of message strategy for systematically planning. When the advertisers choose to use video ads with slogans, they should adopt more rational appeals, creative elements, information cues, and execution elements. The video advertisements of the two groups of new products (INP vs. RNP) differ significantly in the elements presented by the message strategy in the context of whether there are advertising slogans. Originality/Value/Contribution This is the first study that examines the similarities and differences between the presentation frequency of various message strategic elements of the two types of digital video advertisements (no slogan vs. slogan). In addition, it examined the influence mechanism of advertising slogans on the four elements of message strategy.

Differences in Blame-Like and Forgiveness-Like Judgments between Young People, Healthy Older People, and Older People with Dementia

The objective of the present experimental study was to compare how young people, healthy older people, and older people with dementia cognitively integrated<em> </em>three factors (Intention, Consequence, and Apology) when making blame-like judgments (prosecution and revenge) and forgiveness-like judgments (resentment and reconciliation). Thirty-four young people (<em>Mage </em>= 22.12, <em>SD </em>= 3.44), 22 healthy older people (<em>Mage </em>= 71.82, <em>SD </em>= 8.69), and 18 older people with dementia (<em>Mage </em>= 75, <em>SD </em>= 10.06) participated in the study. The participants were confronted with 12 scenarios built by combining the three factors for each moral judgment. Analyses of variance with repeated measures were applied to the study data. Whatever the type of judgment, older people with dementia differed from young people and healthy older people about the number of factors considered. Young people and healthy older people used the three information cues (Intent, Consequence, and Apology) for the four judgment tasks (prosecution, revenge, reconciliation, and resentment). In comparison, older people with dementia gave greater weight to Intention. In contrast to young and healthy older people, older people with dementia processed blame-like and forgiveness-like judgments similarly. The cognitive impairment prevented older people with dementia from differentiating moral judgments into two categories and reduced information integration when making moral judgments. These findings might be useful for clinical practice.

Carbon savings, fun, and money: The effectiveness of multiple motives for eco-driving and green charging with electric vehicles in Germany

Electric vehicles can contribute to CO2 emission reduction significantly because these vehicles can be charged with renewable energy (green charging). Second, these vehicles can be driven energy-efficiently by using in-vehicle eco-features and by adapting eco-driving behaviors (e.g., avoid excessive speed). However, both green charging and eco-driving are associated with behavioral costs (e.g., time losses), which could discourage individuals from performing the behaviors. Therefore, this study investigated if interventions (e.g., monetary incentives) could motivate behavioral action. We conducted an experimental driving study with 94 German drivers on the company site of a vehicle manufacturer and on public roads in the south of Germany to investigate how combined interventions affect green charging and eco-driving. Participants were randomly assigned to the intervention or the control group. The findings suggest that a combined intervention with informational cues (i.e., CO2 emission savings) as well as gamified (i.e., competitive task) and monetary incentives did not significantly motivate individuals to choose a green charging station. However, the intervention did motivate individuals to seek eco-driving information. Being interested in eco-driving behaviors helped to improve energy consumption during a real-world drive. Hence, interventions providing behavioral information and addressing multiple motives should be further investigated to understand how future electric vehicle owners can be motivated to behave pro-environmentally.

PathwayKO: An integrated platform for deciphering the systems-level signaling pathways.

Systems characterization of immune landscapes in health, disease and clinical intervention cases is a priority in modern medicine. High-throughput transcriptomes accumulated from gene-knockout (KO) experiments are crucial for deciphering target KO signaling pathways that are impaired by KO genes at the systems-level. There is a demand for integrative platforms. This article describes the PathwayKO platform, which has integrated state-of-the-art methods of pathway enrichment analysis, statistics analysis, and visualizing analysis to conduct cutting-edge integrative pathway analysis in a pipeline fashion and decipher target KO signaling pathways at the systems-level. We focus on describing the methodology, principles and application features of PathwayKO. First, we demonstrate that the PathwayKO platform can be utilized to comprehensively analyze real-world mouse KO transcriptomes (GSE22873 and GSE24327), which reveal systemic mechanisms underlying the innate immune responses triggered by non-infectious extensive hepatectomy (2 hours after 85% liver resection surgery) and infectious CASP-model sepsis (12 hours after CASP-model surgery). Strikingly, our results indicate that both cases hit the same core set of 21 KO MyD88-associated signaling pathways, including the Toll-like receptor signaling pathway, the NFκB signaling pathway, the MAPK signaling pathway, and the PD-L1 expression and PD-1 checkpoint pathway in cancer, alongside the pathways of bacterial, viral and parasitic infections. These findings suggest common fundamental mechanisms between these immune responses and offer informative cues that warrant future experimental validation. Such mechanisms in mice may serve as models for humans and ultimately guide formulating the research paradigms and composite strategies to reduce the high mortality rates of patients in intensive care units who have undergone successful traumatic surgical treatments. Second, we demonstrate that the PathwayKO platform model-based assessments can effectively evaluate the performance difference of pathway analysis methods when benchmarked with a collection of proper transcriptomes. Together, such advances in methods for deciphering biological insights at the systems-level may benefit the fields of bioinformatics, systems immunology and beyond.

“Left and right prefrontal routes to action comprehension”

Successful action comprehension requires the integration of motor information and semantic cues about objects in context. Previous evidence suggests that while motor features are dorsally encoded in the fronto-parietal action observation network (AON); semantic features are ventrally processed in temporal structures. Importantly, these dorsal and ventral routes seem to be preferentially tuned to low (LSF) and high (HSF) spatial frequencies, respectively. Recently, we proposed a model of action comprehension where we hypothesized an additional route to action understanding whereby coarse LSF information about objects in context is projected to the dorsal AON via the prefrontal cortex (PFC), providing a prediction signal of the most likely intention afforded by them. Yet, this model awaits for experimental testing. To this end, we used a perturb-and-measure continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) approach, selectively disrupting neural activity in the left and right PFC and then evaluating the participant's ability to recognize filtered action stimuli containing only HSF or LSF. We find that stimulation over PFC triggered different spatial-frequency modulations depending on lateralization: left-cTBS and right-cTBS led to poorer performance on HSF and LSF action stimuli, respectively. Our findings suggest that left and right PFC exploit distinct spatial frequencies to support action comprehension, providing evidence for multiple routes to social perception in humans.

Factors Influencing Consumers' Willingness-to-Try Seafood Byproducts.

With increasing global demand for seafood, seafood byproducts (SB) utilization can contribute to a more sustainable food supply chain through waste-to-value food product development. However, consumer perceptions of SB (e.g., fish skin and bones) are underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate some factors influencing consumers' willingness-to-try seafood byproducts. An online survey was conducted in the USA regarding intervention of SB informational cues with N = 904 adult seafood consumers internationally. The proportion of consumers willing to try SB increased significantly (McNemar's test, α = 0.05) from 47% to 68% after SB safety and health claims had been presented in the questionnaire. Gender, race, SB knowledge, and previous SB consumption were significant predictors of trial intent (based on logistic regression), as were emotional baseline scores during the COVID-19 pandemic. Males were more open to SB consumption than females, and racial identity was associated with differential responsiveness to SB information. Higher levels of "bored" and "unsafe" feelings, and lower levels of "free" were associated with increased SB trial intent. Potential SB consumers identified fish products (82% willingness-to-try); seasoning mix, sauces, and dressing (71% willingness-to-try); and soup and gravy products (62% willingness-to-try) as most appropriate for SB incorporation. Predominant reasons for SB avoidance were concerns about sensory quality, safety, and nutrition. These consumer-driven data could guide SB product development concepts to encourage trial and overcome aversions through new consumption experience.