# Webcam Eye Tracking for Monitoring Visual Attention in Hypothetical Online Shopping Tasks
## 5 Discussion
### Limitations and Further Research  
This study has some limitations which need to be discussed and could serve as a basis for further research. First, our judgement of webcam eye tracking being a suitable tool is based on the observation that our data recorded with the software EYEVIDO Lab are in line with results obtained with infrared eye tracking by other researchers. To substantiate this statement, and to further assess the potential of webcam eye tracking, comparative studies could be conducted with webcam and infrared eye tracking using the same stimuli and tasks. In this context, other providers of webcam eye tracking software could also be included.  
In further studies, various factors potentially influencing gaze behaviour could be manipulated in an experimental setting. Thus, it could be investigated how the aspects mentioned in the discussion, e.g., changing positions or different partitioning of the website, influence visual attention. In addition, other conditions could be changed, such as exposure times or task. Considering participant characteristics such as age, gender, or attitudes in the statistical analyses could further contribute to explain differences in visual attention.  
Product depictions should be characterised not only by showing a human model or not but also by the number of product variants. In product depictions with human models, in most cases only one product variant is shown, which is worn by the human model. In other product depictions, more than one product variant is shown. Including the number of variants shown in a specific product depiction as an additional independent variable might be a useful estimation strategy to separate these two effects.  
The differentiation of product depictions into two categories with vs. without human models may mask more details of the role of the human model: How important is the display of the face of the human model? How important is the sex of the human model? How important is the physical attractiveness of the human model? Are real humans necessary to achieve more visual attention or might realistic mannequins have the same effect? The later might be relevant if participants are especially interested to see how the clothing fits with body shape.  
Our study does not allow inferring from the participants' gaze behaviour their choice of clothing or their purchase behaviour. A high number of participants visiting an AOI might not correspond to purchase intention or real purchase behaviour. Future studies should test for these relationships. For this purpose, it might be interesting to integrate the experiment in a real-life online shopping experiment in which visitors of an online shop are asked to participate in the experiment.  
Finally, even though any influence by artificial laboratory conditions or the presence of a researcher on gaze behaviour was excluded by our study approach, neither the behaviour of the participants during study participation (e.g., appropriate distance to the webcam; avoiding head movements) nor the adequacy of their equipment could be controlled. This might have negatively affected the eye tracking recordings and thus the results of this study. Better control over the general conditions could be achieved if webcam eye tracking studies were conducted in the laboratory or in the field in the presence of a researcher. However, this would eclipse the described advantages of webcam eye tracking in terms of spatiotemporal and personal independence.