Eye-tracking study of the celebrity effect on microblogging browsing: an example from Sina microblog

In this study, 89 college students were selected as research participants and the eye-tracking method was used to explore their browsing patterns and cognitive processing mechanisms for microblogging pages of celebrities and non-celebrities. Results showed that participants were more interested in the microblogging pages of celebrities than non-celebrities. Different types of participants had different cognitive processing strategies for microblogging pages: frequent bloggers used top-down processing methods to process the microblogging pages and infrequent bloggers used bottom-up methods for more sophisticated processing. Participants also had different degrees of cognitive processing for different regions of the microblogging pages. All participants gave priority to the processing of microblog contents, but the processing of celebrity microblog pages showed the dominant effect of profile picture, and the priority of blogger information was revealed in the processing of non-celebrity microblogs.