Ninety-five percent of human decision-making occurs on a subconscious level. When consumers enter a retail setting, they are heavily influenced by factors that do not enter their conscious realm of thought. Common sensory practices capture consumer perception through hedonic scale measurements used for in-home and central location tests. These sensory tests are designed to understand conscious thoughts from consumers but may fail to capture deeper influences from the subconscious. To capture the subconscious impact on decision-making, eye tracking has been used in several research fields. The objective of this study was to apply eye-tracking methodology in combination with traditional self-reported measures to further understand consumer perception of beef color and marbling.
The official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Small50 grading card image was edited by an experienced photographer (Adela Fernandez Photography, Adobe Photoshop CC, in San Jose, Calif.) to create different degrees of color (pale, ideal and dark) and marbling (slight, small and modest). By editing this one image to create those three levels of color and marbling, we were able to control the inherent variation that would occur through selecting multiple steaks to obtain these images (i.e. fat thickness, marbling texture, slight color variations, loin eye area). Six trials were created by arranging the images in sets of three where either marbling or color was held constant among the images while the other color or marbling characteristic differed.