Through a child's eyes: eye tracking to study children's consumer behavior

Purpose - This conceptual paper provides an overview of eye-tracking technology (ETT) as a process-tracing method to study children's consumer behavior. This paper aims to provide a literature review of the child as consumer-focused eye-tracking research, identifying theoretical and research gaps. This paper discusses the benefits, drawbacks and ethical implications of ETT and highlights opportunities and best practices for future research. Design/methodology/approach - This paper details eye movement and how ETT captures it. This paper delivers a typology of different approaches to eye-tracking research and presents information about ETT equipment and metrics. This paper also summarizes previous studies using eye tracking to study children. This paper concludes with research questions and topics for future research where ETT can be used to study child consumers in contexts such as playing advergames, using social media and shopping (in-person and online). Findings - ETT is commonly used to assess children's behavior in a variety of contexts but has scarcely been used to study children's consumer behavior. ETT has great potential to be used to better understand children as consumers. Originality/value - To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to review using ETT to study children's consumer behavior.