Data Points: Political Amnesia

What do people look at when they visit the websites of presidential candidates, and do they actually remember anything they see? In December, EyeTrackShop asked people to look at the sites of the then-eight major candidates for 10 seconds each while it followed their gaze via Web camera. Afterwards, respondents were asked which candidates they remembered just seeing. (They could pick from the correct eight plus five other candidates.) Respondents were also asked to pick the candidate they’d vote for, based on the attractiveness of the site.

Among the key findings:

• Barack Obama’s and Michele Bachmann’s campaign sites were the ones most people remembered seeing
• Excluding those campaign sites, fewer than 5 out of 10 respondents even remembered the candidate they saw 1 minute ago.