The VR Billboard Paradigm: Using VR and Eye-tracking to Examine the Exposure-Reception-Retention Link in Realistic Communication Environments

Exposure is the cornerstone of media and message effects research. If a health, political, or commercial message is not noticed, no effects can ensue. Yet, existing research in communication, advertising, and related disciplines often fails to measure exposure and demonstrate the causal link between quantified exposure to outcomes because actual exposure (i.e., whether recipients were not only exposed to messages but also took notice of them) is difficult to capture. Here, we harness Virtual Reality (VR) technology integrated with eye tracking to overcome this challenge. While eye-tracking technology alone can capture whether people attend to messages in their communication environment, most eye-tracking research is bound by laboratory-based screen-reading paradigms that are not representative of the broader communication environments in which messages are encountered. Emerging eye-tracking field research suffers from an inability to control and experimentally manipulate key variables. Our solution is to measure eye-tracking within an immersive environment in VR that resembles a realistic message reception context. Specifically, we simulate driving down a highway alongside which billboards are placed and use VR-integrated eye-tracking to measure whether the drivers look at individual billboard messages. This allows us to rigorously quantify the nexus between exposure and reception, and to link our measures to subsequent memory, i.e., whether messages were remembered, forgotten, or not even encoded. We further demonstrate that manipulating drivers attention directly impacts gaze behavior and memory. We discuss the large potential of this paradigm to quantify exposure and message reception in realistic communication environments and the equally promising applications in new media contexts (e.g., the Metaverse).