Eye-Tracked Visual Attention to Anthropomorphic Appearance and Empathic Responses in AI Medical Conversational...

Understanding how users perceive and attend to the anthropomorphic appearance and empathic responses of artificial intelligence medical conversational agents (AIMCAs) can help reveal the key judgment cues underlying trust formation and use decisions, while also informing interface and dialog design. To this end, this study employs a 3 (appearance anthropomorphism: high, medium, low) × 2 (empathic response: present, absent) within-subject eye-tracking experiment, combined with subjective scales and brief post-task open-ended feedback. During a static prototype viewing task based on hypothetical consultation scenarios, we concurrently recorded trust, behavioral intention, and visual measures for key areas of interest (AOIs; appearance area, conversational content area, and overall interface area). Eye-tracking measures were normalized by AOI coverage proportion to improve cross-AOI comparability. The results show that both anthropomorphic appearance and empathic response significantly increased users' trust in AIMCAs and their behavioral intention. An interaction between these two types of social cues was also observed, suggesting that when visual embodiment and linguistic style are aligned at the social level, users are more likely to form favorable overall judgments. At the level of visual processing, however, no interaction effect was found, and the eye-tracking measures showed only partial main effects, indicating that subjective synergy does not necessarily correspond to synergistic changes in attentional allocation. Overall, anthropomorphic appearance and empathic response exerted consistent facilitating effects on outcome variables, but displayed different patterns of attentional allocation and information prioritization at the visual level. Accordingly, AIMCA design should emphasize consistency between appearance cues and conversational strategies, optimize users' initial judgments and interface comprehension, and use intention through verifiable information organization and clear boundary cues.