Influence of Purchase Context on Consumer Information-Seeking Behaviors and Product Evaluation: A Comparison of Investigations Through Eye-tracking Data and Evaluation Questionnaires

Contingency in consumer choice behavior has long been discussed, and this behavioral uncertainty has appeared to occur because purchase context can change a consumer’s decision-making strategy; yet, the specific mechanism of this context has remained unclear. Some studies in computational brain research have explained that contexts have temporal modification functions to information representations of objects or items in the brain (e.g., “Selective desensitization method”; Morita 2002). In this study, we measured the viewing habits of consumers using eye-tracking systems, and investigated how purchase context influences consumers’ information seeking while they make their decisions. We observed that context inhibits cognition cost through the selective reduction of information seeking. This result concurs with previous computational brain studies. Additionally, by analyzing post-measurement questionnaires, some commonality and variance between context-dependent cognitive and emotional influences were observed. This study’s results serve as a basis for estimating how the evaluation of a product’s attributes changes depending on context, and how context influences decision-making