EVALUATING CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS CONSUMER RESPONSES IN MARKETING THROUGH PUPILLOMETRY: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Neuromarketing research has increasingly sought to transcend the limitations of traditional self-report and behavioral measures by incorporating physiological techniques that capture nonconscious consumer processes. Among these, pupil dilation has emerged as a valuable yet underutilized metric for assessing emotional arousal, cognitive effort, and motivational engagement. Despite its theoretical promise, pupil dilation remains secondary to fixation-based eye-tracking metrics in mainstream consumer behavior research. This study systematically reviews 30 empirical studies employing pupil dilation within marketing and consumer behavior contexts. Using the TCCM framework, we analyze how pupil-based metrics have been theorized, applied, and interpreted across diverse marketing settings. A bibliometric analysis complements the review, mapping the intellectual structure and thematic evolution of pupillometric consumer research. Findings reveal that pupil dilation is predominantly associated with visual attention, emotional arousal, cognitive load, and preference formation, offering a nonverbal, real-time window into consumers’ subconscious responses. However, methodological limitations such as luminance sensitivity, emotional valence ambiguity, and lack of standardization persist across the literature. This review highlights the untapped potential of pupil dilation as a diagnostic tool in consumer neuroscience and calls for greater multimodal integration, ecological validity, cross-cultural exploration, and methodological rigor in future research. By moving beyond fixation-based metrics, scholars and practitioners can better capture the hidden cognitive and affective drivers of consumer behavior.