Eye-Tracking and Decision Making
Overview
Where you look when making a decision is not random. It reflects what you are attending to and what you are processing. Gaze is largely unconscious, cannot be coached in any systematic way, and makes the decision process visible.
Key Findings
Krajbich, Armel & Rangel (2010, Nature Neuroscience) showed that fixation patterns causally shape how evidence accumulates toward a choice. People integrate roughly 3x more evidence for the option they are looking at. Gaze doesn’t just reflect preference — it shapes the decision.
Borozan, Cannito & Palumbo (2022) reviewed 51 studies and found eye-tracking provides access to cognitive processes underlying decisions that no self-report method can reach.
Lahey & Oxley (2019, Judgment and Decision Making) demonstrated that simple eye-movement metrics predict future financial decision performance out of sample.
What Gaze Patterns Reveal
These are micro-behavioral preferences — stable, learned behavioral signatures:
- How much information someone genuinely engages with before committing
- How speed trades off against accuracy under pressure
- Which cognitive biases are most likely to distort their judgement
- Whether they can sustain deliberate reasoning vs. defaulting to intuition
Why It Matters for Assessment
A candidate can optimise a CV or rehearse interview answers. They cannot alter the unconscious patterns in their gaze under a real decision task. Eye-tracking is one of the first scalable ways to observe attention and cognition directly, and one of the few methods AI cannot game.