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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

eye tracking, memory, susceptibility to phishing

College

Life Sciences

Department

Information Systems

Abstract

Warning messages are one of the last lines of defense in computer security and are fundamental to users’ security interactions with technology. Consequently, researchers have actively sought to understand how users interact with security warnings and why warnings are so pervasively ignored. A key contributor to the disregard of security warnings is habituation—i.e., the diminishing of attention because of frequent exposure to warning. Although habituation has been inferred as a factor in many security-warning studies, little research has examined habituation in the context of security directly because habituation as a mental state is difficult to observe using conventional methods. Therefore, there is a gap in our understanding regarding how habituation to security warnings occurs in the brain, limiting researchers’ efforts to design warnings that can mitigate its effects.

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