Processamento visual da informação financeira: uma abordagem experimental

Abstract

From the aim of exploring how visual presentation impacts the processing of financial information, experimental situations were created that could describe how financial information is processed, investigate how individuals direct attention according to the geographic positioning of the disclosed financial information, and examine how distractions influence the processing of financial information. The tasks were included in a domain where each participant could access, if they had an internet connection and had a webcam so that their eye tracking could be captured during the reading of the tasks for analysis in conjunction with the memory questions about what had been read. In general, low memory and processing of what was read was identified, regardless of the way the information was presented, its geographical arrangement and the presence of distracting elements during the performance of tasks. In the first trial, the experiment modified the way information was presented, whether just text, just graphic elements, or text combined with graphics. In this first experiment, an absence of difference and association and a low influence of the presented format on information processing were observed, although the heatmaps indicated a greater concentration of gaze fixations on the elements presented first in the task. In the second trial, whose experiment modified the geographical arrangement of the information, no statistically significant differences were found between the groups, as well as the absence of a relevant association, only being verified that in prediction by crossvalidation that the participants who receive information in a single column had lower recall than those who viewed the task in two columns, reinforced by the heatmaps that demonstrate greater visual dispersion for the single column. Finally, the third test identified that the presence of notifications modifies visual attention in the sense of dispersing it, but the impact on processing was not evident, indicating that there is a possible impact on performance, but not on the accuracy of what is read. Therefore, the research concludes that the visualization of financial information is based much more on the salience of the content than on the shape, arrangement, or presence of distracting elements during the performance of report reading tasks.