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The “visual preference heuristic ” suggests that consumers prefer visual to verbal depiction of information in a product assortment. Images produce greater percep-tions of variety than text, which is appealing in assortment selection, but can result in choice complexity and overload when choice sets are large and preferences are unknown, suggesting a moderator for Iyengar and Lepper’s results. Eye-track-ing results reveal that the natural gestalt processing of individual visual stimuli, as compared to the piecemeal processing of individual textual stimuli, affects the processing of the assortment as a whole with visual (compared to verbal) pre-sentation facilitating a faster, though more haphazard, scanning of the assortment. While the less systematic processing that results from visual presentation feels easier, it is not ideal for larger assortments resulting in higher complexity ratings and choice overload than with text depiction. These findings reveal that, like many heuristics, preference for visual depiction may be overapplied. As online access becomes increasingly common, con-sumers are becoming multichannel shoppers, as likely to view product assortments online as offline. The online
Townsend et al. (Wed,) studied this question.