List length has little impact on consumers’ visual attention to CATA questions

• Visual attention to CATA questions featuring 20 and 12 terms was largely similar.
• Individual terms received less visual attention when using “long” lists.
• Sensory characterization elicited by “long” and “short” lists differed in minor ways.

Check-all-that-apply (CATA) questions continue to gain popularity and attract interest in developing guidelines regarding their implementation and analysis. The current research continues on this path and considers visual attention by consumers to CATA questions. This is a pre-requisite for elicitation of valid data. Extending previous research, we consider whether CATA question list length influences consumers’ visual attention to the task when it moderately increases from 12 to 20 terms. In a study with six wheat crackers consumers (n ∼ 120) used a CATA questions with either a “short” list (12 terms) or a “long” list (20 terms). The main difference in visual processing was less attention to individual CATA terms when using “long” lists, but greater sustained visual attention to the task. The sensory characterisations for wheat crackers elicited by “long” and “short” lists differed only in minor ways, pointing to little practical impact of the observed differences in visual processing. Upon replication of the current results, consideration of how these findings generalise to test situations with longer CATA questions (30+ terms), tests with fewer/more samples and/or samples with more complex sensory characteristics is warranted.