From Advertising to Decision-Making

This paper offers an integrative bibliometric review of consumer visual attention research,‎ with a particular focus on studies using eye-tracking and related methods. Drawing on 1,278 articles‎ indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection between 1989 and 2022, the study examines publication ‎trends, thematic structures and their evolution, and how issues of distraction and hybrid digital–physical‎ environments challenge traditional views of consumer decision-making. Keyword co-occurrence‎ analyses, combined with thematic mapping across five time periods, are used to identify core research ‎clusters and their interrelations. The results show a strong and accelerating growth of the field since 2014,‎ alongside a marked dispersion of research across journals and countries, confirming visual attention as an‎ established and interdisciplinary area within consumer research. Three enduring thematic pillars emerge:‎ visual attention in multi-attribute decision-making, visual attention in advertising and communication,‎ and applied domains such as nutrition information, health warnings and retail environments, while ‎recent work highlights attentional competition and points to emerging questions around distraction and‎ hybrid digital–physical spaces. The paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides a conceptually‎ oriented overview that places visual attention, rather than specific tools, at the center of analysis. Second,‎ it shows how previously separate streams in decision-making, advertising and health communication‎ converge around shared questions of attentional dynamics in complex environments. Third, it develops ‎a future research agenda that explicitly foregrounds distraction and attentional competition in hybrid‎ digital–physical consumer spaces and links these phenomena to emerging technologies and theory driven‎ studies of attention.‎