Escaping the Filter Bubble: Evaluating Electroencephalographic Theta Band Synchronization as Indicator for Selective Exposure in Online News Reading

2025-04-25

CHI Extended Abstracts

AI Summary

This study addresses the issue of selective exposure during online news consumption, which can lead users to become trapped in information cocoons. To identify this behavior in real time, the work proposes a novel multimodal neurophysiological marker that integrates eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG), specifically leveraging theta-band synchronization and gaze patterns. By simultaneously recording EEG theta power, eye movements, and participants’ attitude ratings toward news articles, the research reveals a significant positive correlation between parietal theta power and news认同度 (attitude alignment). This approach effectively captures the neural mechanisms underlying selective exposure and offers a quantifiable, real-time pathway toward mitigating the formation of information cocoons.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Neural Spike Coding
• Humans and AI: Brain-Sensing and Analysis
• Natural Language Processing: Information Extraction

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling for targeted and personalized online advertising

Abstract

Selective exposure to online news occurs when users favor information that confirms their beliefs, creating filter bubbles and limiting diverse perspectives. Interactive systems can counter this by recommending different perspectives, but to achieve this, they need a real-time metric for selective exposure. We present an experiment where we evaluate Electroencephalography (EEG) and eyetracking as indicators for selective exposure by using eye tracking to recognize which textual parts participants read and using EEG to quantify the magnitude of selective exposure. Participants read online news while we collected EEG and eye movements with their agreement towards the news. We show that the agreement with news correlates positively with the theta band power in the parietal area. Our results indicate that future interactive systems can sense selective exposure using EEG and eye tracking to propose a more balanced information diet. This work presents an integrated experimental setup that identifies selective exposure using gaze and EEG-based metrics.

Problem

• selective exposure
• filter bubble
• online news
• EEG
• theta band

Innovation

• EEG
• theta band
• selective exposure
• eye tracking
• filter bubble