Exploring browsing patterns in domain-specific critical online reasoning: an eye-tracking study on visits and fixations in different website areas.

Abstract This study uses eye-tracking to investigate variations in Critical Online Reasoning (COR) task-solving to particularize implicit inferences from output-oriented log data. First-semester economics and sociology students were given a domain-specific task needing open web search. The gaze data were obtained from the three websites that were consulted most frequently, with sample sizes varying across these sites. We analyze how area-specific fixation duration and visit counts vary during online information processing. Low-performers in economic tasks fixate longer and return more often to illustrative and exemplary text paragraphs and avoid scrolling down on a website, indicating a less holistic engagement with the content. In contrast, high performers spend more time on abstract text paragraphs, headlines, bottom text sections, as well as author references, and revisit them more frequently, suggesting a deeper and more systematic processing strategy. Future research can increase the generalizability of these findings, by taking account of the website context or by limiting the task to predefined and deliberately manipulated websites in more controlled misinformation settings.