Tourists’ visual attention and stress intensity under COVID-19 environmental stimuli: An eye-tracking study

Author Bios (50 Words for each Author)

Peizhe Li is an undergraduate research assistant at the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University. His research interests include climate change adaptation planning for cultural heritages, tourists' stress, emotion, and coping.

Xiao Xiao is an assistant professor at the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University. Her research interests include climate adaptation planning for parks and recreation areas and transportation management in parks and protected areas.

Evan Jordan is an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Wellness Design in the School of Public Health at Indiana University. His research focuses on the impacts of tourism on the physical and mental health of residents of host communities. He is particularly interested in tourism’s impact on stress, emotions, and quality of life and their implications for public health.

Abstract (150 Words)

Visual attention elicits focal scenes, facilitates attention restorativeness capacity, and provokes stress appraisal processes for tourists. This study explores tourists’ visual attention and stress appraisals and examines how situational factors (e.g., COVID-preventive measures and natural sound) may affect stress appraisal processes by a mixed-methodology involving observations, eye-tracking experiments, and post-experiment surveys. Findings suggest that tourists’ attention to natural landscape decreases with crowding stimuli. Natural landscape’s attention restoration capacity may influence tourists’ cognitive appraisals of stress when the crowding stimuli were low or medium, but the impacts are minimal when the crowding stimuli were high. Moreover, natural sound can serve as the complementary of visualscape to facilitate tourists’ attention restorativeness capacity and mitigate stress. We suggest that mask-wearing can reduce tourists’ attention to human crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings extend the attention restoration theory by a multi-sensory perspective and the transactional theory of stress through eye-tracking analytics.

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Tourists’ visual attention and stress intensity under COVID-19 environmental stimuli: An eye-tracking study

Visual attention elicits focal scenes, facilitates attention restorativeness capacity, and provokes stress appraisal processes for tourists. This study explores tourists’ visual attention and stress appraisals and examines how situational factors (e.g., COVID-preventive measures and natural sound) may affect stress appraisal processes by a mixed-methodology involving observations, eye-tracking experiments, and post-experiment surveys. Findings suggest that tourists’ attention to natural landscape decreases with crowding stimuli. Natural landscape’s attention restoration capacity may influence tourists’ cognitive appraisals of stress when the crowding stimuli were low or medium, but the impacts are minimal when the crowding stimuli were high. Moreover, natural sound can serve as the complementary of visualscape to facilitate tourists’ attention restorativeness capacity and mitigate stress. We suggest that mask-wearing can reduce tourists’ attention to human crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings extend the attention restoration theory by a multi-sensory perspective and the transactional theory of stress through eye-tracking analytics.