PROVO, Utah, July 2 (UPI) -- Using sophisticated eye-tracking technology, U.S. researchers found alcohol advertisers' "responsible drinking" messages were often ignored by teens.
Lead author Steven Thomsen of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, had 63 middle school students wear a headpiece with an eye-tracker that allowed a computer to map where they looked and measure how long they fixated on various points of interest in each ad. The youth saw ads for a variety of products and didn't know of the study's focus on alcohol.
The researchers found the adolescents looked at magazine alcohol ads for about seven seconds each, however, they only looked at the drink alcohol responsibly message for .35 seconds.
Immediately after viewing the ads in the study, four out of five teens could not recall the general concept of these messages, such as "Stay on your game -- drink responsibly" and "So, if you're underage, just don't drink."
The findings are reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
