Visual perception of war images in Spanish TV news: an eye-tracking study using still frames

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.