ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Visual Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1612487
This article is part of the Research TopicNeurocinematics: How the Brain Perceives AudiovisualsView all 7 articles
Visual Perception of War Images in Spanish TV News: An Eye-Tracking Study Using Still Frames
Provisionally accepted
- 1Radio Televisión Española Instituto, Barcelona, Spain
- 2Neuro-Com Research Group, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
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Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, screens across the world have been flooded with images of death and destruction in this territory in the West, as televisions globally have broadcast the war, bearing witness to the collapse of a community consumed by terror. This study aimed to investigate the visual perception of still frames of war images taken from Spanish TV news broadcasts. We showed participants (N = 49) a series of war images while tracking their gaze using an eye tracker and administered questionnaires related to the images. We analyzed how viewers allocated their gaze across three sections within the images—journalists, war imagery, and informative text—finding significant differences, with the longest gaze duration and highest number of fixations on war images, followed by the text section, and lastly, the journalists. We compared the time and the way viewers looked at war images featuring deceased individuals versus those without, finding significant differences, with more time and more fixations, but less revisits, dedicated to images containing deceased individuals. When comparing visual attention to leaders of the opposing war factions, Zelenski vs. Putin, the latter received more attention, with participants looking at Putin for a longer period, and this was also associated with stronger negative emotions. In assessing participants’ memory of the presented images, the majority of responses were correct, particularly regarding the content shown in the images, although some participants failed to recall certain elements; however, when it came to content not present in the images, most participants accurately avoided fabricating details that were not shown. These findings offer insights into how war is visually perceived in Spanish television news.
Keywords: War images, Visual Perception, eye tracking, war journalism, Visual fixations, visual memory, visual attention
Received: 15 Apr 2025; Accepted: 24 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Martín-Pascual and Andreu-Sánchez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Miguel Ángel Martín-Pascual, Radio Televisión Española Instituto, Barcelona, Spain
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