Making Choices

You just bought peanut butter. You chose the jar because, well, you've always eaten the crunchy variety. In reality, however, something else may have influenced your choice the product you picked was centrally located on the store shelves. Researchers tracked the eye movements of 67 subjects scanned a 3 by 3 matrix of fictitious brands . The tracking found that consumers tend to focus on the objects in the middle specifically, five seconds before they make their choice. And they do this for all kinds of products, from vitamins to online movies. Also, subjects continued to go for the centrally-located brand even if the product was not in the middle of their specific visual field.