| dc.description.abstract | The formation of habits involving ubiquitous technologies includes aspects of behavior related to perceptions, attention, emotion recognition and decision making that influence the preference for an application (app) during users interaction in a virtual environment. The present studyseeks to explore how behavioral and attentional biases influence mobile user experience while searching for specific visual stimuli. Recent research suggests that the affective value associated with visual stimuli can guide users' attention to emotionally relevant information by increasing engagement and frequency of app usage. Three experiments were designed, in total 55 subjects, apparently healthy, evaluated how positive reward stimuli can drive attention in visual searches using emotional faces and app icons. Were applied the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and mplicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) to understand frequency and preference of apps usage and evaluate if these preferences would be predictive of how fast users find andinteract (visual search) while searching for emotional faces and preferred apps in an array of distractors stimuli. The visual search strategy was recorded by an eye tracking that measured the responses time, scanpaths and fixations of the eye movement. In Experiment 1, the resultsshowed that in a visual search for emotional faces, happy faces were located significantly faster than angry faces in an array of neutral faces used as distractors. In Experiments 2 and 3, implicit preference measures between apps were able to predict the difference in the speed of visual search in a matrix simulating a smartphone interface. These results suggest that behavioral interaction and attention can be modulated by the frequency usage and affective meaning of the stimuli | |
