Exploring Young People's Visual Attention while Assessing Climate Change Content on Social Media

In this study, we utilize a concurrent mixed methods design to explore the attention patterns and processing strategies of young people as they evaluate socioscientific information on social media. We utilized the screen-based Tobii eye tracker to capture ten 8th and twenty 9th grade student's fixations while they evaluated if climate change information was believable or not. The students then completed a retrospective think aloud to explain their process. We find that it is possible to categorize young people's gaze patterns into heuristic and systematic processing categories, and the think aloud data converges with these categories. Further, while most studies are done with adults in a laboratory, we demonstrate that using an eye tracker with a relatively low sampling frequency makes it possible to capture valid and reliable eye tracking in an ecologically valid setting.