Ralf Schmälzle, associate professor in the Department of Communication, and Hee Jung Cho, a doctoral student in the Department of Communication, have published new research in the Journal of Communication, a leading scholarly journal in the field. The study explores how virtual reality and eye-tracking technology can be used to examine the relationship between visual attention and memory in immersive media environments.

Cho is the lead author of the paper, which was conducted at the Center for Avatar Research and Immersive Social Media Applications in Michigan State University’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with faculty and student researchers.

The study addresses a long-standing challenge in communication and advertising research: the gap between the opportunity to be exposed to a message and whether that message is actually seen and remembered. In crowded media environments, messages such as billboards, banners and warning signs are frequently overlooked. To better understand how attention translates into memory, the research team developed a “memory inception” paradigm using virtual reality and integrated eye-tracking technology.