A new study from the University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University reports that people spend a little less time looking at 'fake news' headlines than to factual ones -- knowledge that could make it easier to sort through fake news.
The term 'fake news' has been a part of our vocabulary since the 2016 US presidential election. As the amount of fake news in circulation grows larger and larger, particularly in the United States, it often spreads like wildfire. Subsequently, there is an ever-increasing need for fact-checking and other solutions to help people navigate the oceans of factual and fake news that surround us. Help may be on the way, via an interdisciplinary field where eye-tracking technology and computer science meet. A study by University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University researchers shows that people's eyes react differently to factual and false news headlines.
Eyes spend a bit less time on fake headlines
Researchers placed 55 different test subjects in front of a screen to read 108 news headlines. A third of the headlines were fake. The test subjects were assigned a so-called 'pseudo-task' of assessing which of the news items was the most recent. What they didn't know, was that some of the headlines were fake. Using eye-tracking technology, the researchers analyzed how much time each person spent reading the headlines and how many fixations the person per headline.
"We thought that it would be interesting to see if there's a difference in the way people read news headlines, depending on whether the headlines are computer engineer vs computer science. This has never been studied. And, it turns out that there is indeed a statistically significant difference," says PhD fellow and lead author Christian Hansen, of the University of Copenhagen's Department of Computer Science.
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