Tourists’ Visual Attention and Stress Intensity in Nature-Based Tourism Destinations: An Eye-Tracking Study During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tourists’ visual attention has a central function in constructing their visual experiences and affects their perceptual and cognitive processes. Visual attention might be affected by environmental factors; however, the effects of environmental factors on visual attention are still vague in the literature. Moreover, visual attention might influence tourists’ stress intensity. This study explores how tourists’ visual attention patterns vary under environmental factors and quantifies the effects of visual attention on stress intensity by a mixed- methodology involving observations, eye-tracking experiments, and post-experiment surveys. Findings suggest that crowding is an important environmental factor affecting tourists’ visual attention patterns. Moreover, natural sounds enhance tourists’ visual attention to natural landscapes and mitigate tourists’ stress simultaneously. Mask-wearing can reduce tourists’ visual attention to human crowds but cannot reduce stress intensity directly. Our findings extend the attention restoration theory by a multi-sensory perspective and the transactional theory of stress through eye-tracking analytics.