Persuasive differences between human and virtual influencers in health supplement advertising: evidence from eye-tracking

The findings shift focus from "who performs better" toward understanding "when and why" attention persuades. Attention influences persuasion through a processing fluency-based mechanism, operating via the ease with which the source is perceived as human-both visually and mentally. Eye-tracking complements self-reports by revealing processing before conscious awareness. The patterns yield preliminary hypotheses that human endorsers may better support credibility-intensive claims and suggest a testable framework for how attention could translate into persuasion, offering a starting point for future targeted evaluations.