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Hands-On, Shoes-Off: Multisensory Tools Enhance Family Engagement Within an Art Museum
Abstract
Families with young children typically struggle to engage with traditional art museum environments. This research examined the impact of multisensory tools on family engagement within Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar. Sixty families with at least one child aged 0–11 were observed during two tasks. One task required participants to look at a series of paintings to select their favorite. In another task, families were given a toolkit of multisensory items to facilitate interaction with a painting. A semi-structured observational method produced quantitative and qualitative data about participant engagement and intergenerational interaction. Self-rating scores of task enjoyment were also collected. Results indicate that multisensory tools enhance family engagement with museums, artworks, and each other. Results also suggest that word-based interpretation was not necessary. We consider the potential implications of these findings in relation to family programming within art museums and museums more generally.
... In some cases, there was an experimental design involved followed by a survey or interview as demonstrated in the research conducted by Franse et al., (2020). In addition, most studies that chose to conduct interviews or surveys after the initial observation period were to collect data from caregivers as demonstrated in Eardley et al., (2018). ...
... Exhibits that showed open-endedness, value creativity, and included multisensory aspects showed an increase in children's engagement, which in turn increased their ability to learn (Brown et al, 2019;Eardley et al., 2018;Piscitelli & Penfold, 2015). In a study conducted by Tougu et al. (2017), it was found that when museums incorporated open-endedness it was found that "more spatial play experience was associated with better family problem solving success". ...
... Examples of incorporating open-ended elements into exhibits include creating environments that incorporate physical aspects such as building blocks and going beyond visual content with interactions (Eardley et al., 2018;Piscitelli & Penfold, 2015). ...
To be sustained and prosper as a business, children museums must appease the children while also retaining their caregivers. In this way, it is important to consider the interactive exhibits chosen for children that will spark play, creativity, engagement, and development. Hands-on playing is vital in the development of a child, as it promotes their ability to progress socially, emotionally, and cognitively. Specifically, The Bug Squad at the Discovery Center in Binghamton, NY targeted this need to play directly, as its combination of hands-on learning and activities gauged the attention of the children throughout the museum. The purpose of this mixed-methods research study was to understand the level of engagement throughout the various elements within the museum’s exhibit and how this level of engagement prompted these elements to remain permanent. Data was collected through observation of children’s engagement and a short, five question survey to understand the parent’s point of view. We hypothesize that the elements that expand beyond their main purpose and promote creativity and socialization will attract more engagement. These potential findings can contribute to the sustainability and retention rate of other Children Museums with the implementation of, The Bug Squad.
... Museum visitors also indicate that olfactory interventions improve their comprehension of topics presented in the galleries, makes them feel closer to the past, and builds stronger connections with those around them (Alexopoulos & Bembibre 2023;. Lastly, applying multisensory approaches to the museum encourages hands-on involvement and elongates the amount of time visitors spend engaging with the collection (Eardley, Dobbin et al. 2018). ...
Museums internationally are using scents as a means of storytelling in their galleries, but a methodological process for developing olfactory reproductions - or historically informed scents - is still lesser known and valued. For the first time, this paper raises the importance of crafting intentional olfactory reproductions for the use in cultural heritage. It discusses how to streamline the process of commissioning olfactory reproductions with a scent designer and how to foster transparency of these productions to benefit visitor education. Insights for understanding aspects of transparency for olfactory reproductions and navigating their level of historical intent are gleaned from already established methodologies of heritage scent preservation. These young methodologies provide a framework for improving methods of olfactory storytelling within the field of cultural heritage. The Olfactory Reproduction Matrix presented in this paper compiles methodologies of heritage scent preservation into a table that acts as a practical tool for museum practitioners to use while developing olfactory reproductions in the setting of cultural heritage.
... The adults' role during family visits to a museum has been seen as supportive to a child's exhibit interaction and learning (e.g., Ash et al., 2012;Eardley et al., 2018). This support has been characterized as a type of scaffolding. ...
Although adults are known to play an important role in young children's development, little work has focused on the enactive features of scaffolding in informal learning settings, and the embodied dynamics of intergenerational interaction. To address this gap, this paper undertakes a microinteractional analysis to examine intergenerational collaborative interaction in a science museum setting. The paper presents a fine‐grained moment‐by‐moment analysis of video‐recorded interaction of children and their adult carers around science‐themed objects. Taking an enactive cognition perspective, the analysis enables access to subtle shifts in interactants’ perception, action, gesture, and movement to examine how young children engage with exhibits, and the role adult action plays in supporting young children's engagement with exhibits and developing ideas about science. Our findings demonstrate that intergenerational “embodied scaffolding” is instrumental in making “enactive potentialities” in the environment more accessible for children, thus deepening and enriching children's engagement with science. Adult action is central to revealing scientific dimensions of objects’ interaction and relationships in ways that expose novel types of perception and action opportunities in shaping science experiences and meaning making. This has implications for science education practices since it foregrounds not only “doing” science, through active hands‐on activities, but also speaks to the interconnectedness between senses and the role of the body in thinking. Drawing on the findings, this paper also offers design implications for informal science learning environments.
... Degotardi et al. (2019) also focused on the importance of joint attention for learning, and examined the design features of museums supporting this. Many studies have focused on shared parent-child experiences (Benjamin, Haden, and Wilkerson 2010;Briseño-Garzón 2013;Eardley et al. 2018;Knutson et al. 2016;Lifschitz-Grant 2018;Shine and Acosta 2000). These generally prioritise intended learning outcomes rather than care and shared intimacy. ...
... In museology there is rising focus upon re-introducing the senses back into museum practice, most typically touch, to provide more constructivist learning opportunities and provide support for audiences who may rely less on sight to interact with the world (Ballarin, Balletti, and Vernier 2018;Wilson et al. 2018Wilson et al. , 2020. There is strong evidence supporting the benefits of multisensory experiences in informal learning, with participants in such studies often retaining more information and showing greater enjoyment of exhibition content as a result of multisensory interventions, alongside a great desire to see more in museums (Davidson, Heald, and Hein 1999;Vi et al. 2017;Eardley et al. 2018). The use of 3D prints for such experiences has received much less research attention but appears to show that such models can support informal learning experiences and are at least desired by audiences (Turner et al. 2017;Wilson et al. 2018;Nofal et al. 2018). ...
3D digitization methods have become essential tools in cultural heritage practice. Methods like laser scanning and photogrammetry are being widely applied for the conservation of priceless objects and for enabling audience engagement with history. Such data have value as a new wave of multisensory museum practice ripples through the sector and could provide a perfect use for the enormous corpus of 3D data in cultural heritage. This paper documents such an application, where laser scanning has been used in conjunction with 3D printing to re-present the Chichester Roman tablet, an object of key importance in early Romano-British history, to new audiences. It details the process used to digitize the tablet and recreate different versions of its missing text and its state of preservation. It describes how such data can play a role beyond just documentation. Discussed is how such approaches enrich families’ engagement in cultural heritage and how such material can used as didactic material in higher education.
... Within the museum studies literature and museums practice, families are often depicted as an audience requiring particular forms of engagement (O'Reilly and Lawrenson 2021;Sterry 2011;Eardley et al. 2018) and methodological complexities can frustrate more extensive research on them (Sterry and Beaumont 2006). Among the distinctive body of knowledge on family museum visits, learning is often understood as a key motivator (Black 2012) and outcome (Duncan 1995;Hooper-Greenhill 2007;Moussouri and Hohenstein 2017), and this is reflected in family decisions about museum visitation by both parents and children (Cicero and Teichert 2018). ...
Museum managers face mounting pressures to increase and widen audiences, with families often perceived as a key audience requiring particular forms of engagement. The article utilises spatial ethnographic research at a major international art museum (Tate Modern) to examine how family museum practices relate to museum spatial design. Liminal spaces were found to be vital in shaping the experiences of family visitors by affording opportunies for more banal practices (such as playing, sitting, talking, eating and resting). Although they may be partially supported by collection displays, liminal spaces do not usually feature in museum management agendas. As the social purpose of museums continues to be debated, the paper argues for a greater understanding of the full range of affordances of museums for families, paying attention to the significance of different types of museum spaces in mediating experience and the importance of optimising those spaces for greater access.
... Research shows that family physical and verbal interactions around show indicators of learning and joint meaning making (e.g. Borun et al. 1997, Eardley et al. 2018. Parents have been shown to play a 'teaching' role in museum visits (Diamond 1986;Ellenbogen, 2002) using a range of strategies including pointing to draw attention to exhibit aspects, questioning, and giving explanations that connect the exhibit to prior experiences (Ash, 2002). ...
This article presents a qualitative analysis of family interaction around digital interactive tabletop exhibits. Parents play a teaching role in museum visits, using strategies from encouragement, to giving directions about using exhibits, to offering explanations that connect an exhibit to children’s previous experiences. Touchscreens and touch tables offer different ways of engaging families in museums, raising questions around how these interactive tabletops support family collaboration, specifically their role in fostering scaffolding forms of activity. A multimodal analysis using video data of family interactions around three tabletop exhibits examines the role of digital exhibit design in fostering family collaboration and adult scaffolding behavior. Findings show that particular design elements in exhibit set up, expert video/audio and touch interaction influenced family formation around the exhibit, adult scaffolding and family engagement with the exhibit activity. The article draws on these findings to inform the design of interactive tabletop exhibits for family collaboration.
... In each museum I observed dozens of interactions of visitors with the RV, which I noted in field-booklets. Observations are ideal for understanding processes (over products), and are especially beneficial for observing activities that are not reflected in the texts (on qualitative research in museums see Eardley et al., 2018;Noy, 2011). Interviews with museum staff were conducted in order to gain insights into their views on museum-audience interactions, and their considerations when employing various RVs (media ideologies). ...
Museum scholars and professionals agree that audiences’ texts are under-researched and are often approached anecdotally. This state limits the ability to advance effective theorizing of, and interventions in, audience participation and engagement with museums. The article addresses this lacuna by promoting a contextual media-centered conceptualization of both audiences’ texts and the media that elicit and mediate them. The article responds to the mediatic turn in museum studies and to the recent call for on-the-ground research of media-related museum practice. Taking comment books as a case study, the concept of response vehicles (RVs) is offered, defined as onsite institutional media, serving to elicit, record, and display audiences’ texts. The study employs data-rich qualitative methods to depict the participatory affordances of two RVs in two history museums, and to analyze the texts they elicit and display. Four reading strategies (“keys”), tailored specifically to evaluate audiences texts as forms of participation, are demonstrated.
... In this article, we will consider examples of the use of advanced information technologies for the formation of a modern Museum exhibition space within the framework of the multisensory environment concept [3][4][5][6][7]. The use of virtual, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, Internet of things technologies in the formation of the museum space gives rise to a lot of interdisciplinary scientific issues that are at the intersection of design, art, museum businesses, and information technology. ...
Today art museum is facing the challenge of adapting it’s mechanisms of keeping and presenting the works of art to spectators belonging to the communication society. Therefore, a museum gets more and more engaged in the process of digitalization using such newer technologies as internet of things, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, bid data design etc. The aims of a museum are currently shifting from traditional keeping the art pieces and studying them to—developing a scientific networks, announcing the highlights in social media and creating platforms which present digitalized pieces online allowing a viewer to collect the information through the web, moreover, an offline visit could be guided by a specified application customized to fit the necessitates of each user. An art institution today is supposed to be flexible and democratic enough to create an engaging, immersive area for a visitor to interact with, in other words, we argue that a museum armed with newer technologies is supposed not only a to secure and present the works of art but also to incorporate these pieces into the bigger flux of information, make them visible and important to viewers, to create the conditions for a lasting dialogue. We argue that this process involves not only the technical development of a museum, but also a new approach no narration of art history.
... By fostering the museum atmosphere, managers could strategically develop the museum experience to attract customer segments that are pursuing hedonic as opposed to utilitarian value such as millennials (Hyun et al., 2018) or that traditionally struggle to engage with traditional art museums such as families with young children (Eardley et al., 2018). By emphasizing the museum ambiance and aesthetics, museum could start addressing different generational and cultural needs (Hyun et al., 2018). ...
This paper examines the role of museum atmosphere in affecting brand trustworthiness, perceived quality, visitor satisfaction, and visitor behavioral intentions in a museum context in Italy. While broadly examined with reference to stores, atmosphere has been
rarely looked at in the museum context, particularly in Italy, the authors developed a research framework to investigate the relationships among museum atmosphere, brand trustworthiness, perceived quality, intention to revisit, and intention to recommend.
Using a survey as a research instrument, the study was conducted with 1,370 visitors of three Italian museums: Museo delle Culture (MUDEC), Museo del Novecento, and Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM). Results show that the museum atmosphere affects both perceptions of brand trustworthiness, and visitor behavioral intentions. The paper makes the case for using the development of the atmosphere as a strategy to include the visitor perspective in the museum value co-creation process. Theoretical and managerial implications are then outlined.
... Finally, sustained shared thinking frequently occurred in exhibitions where content was represented in multiple ways. Sometimes, this involved children experiencing content through multiple senses, such as being able to touch, see and hear aspects of the exhibits (as in Eardley, Dobbin, Neves & Ride, 2018). When this piqued their curiosity, they were eager to find out more. ...
Recent research indicates that museums hold great potential for children’s engagement and learning. To date, most research has either focused on school-aged children or young children’s independent learning engagement and, as a result, little research has investigated how museum spaces may foster and enhance the interactive learning of families with prior-to-school-age children. The current study sought to investigate which features of museum spaces might promote rich learning conversations within such families when visiting three metropolitan museums. Applying an interpretivist lens on video data generated from child and parent videos, and analyzing postvisit interview data, this study found shared attention, questioning, technical vocabulary, and cognitive connections featured in the learning conversations in such spaces. Further, intricate detail, different perspectives, interactivity and multimodality were significant exhibit design features that appeared to promote such learning conversations. Implications for exhibit design are discussed in relation to the undergirding concept of sustained shared thinking. Free from: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/REKHYFZ6WH4TIZBR2VTT/full?target=10.1080/10645578.2019.1664849
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology provides a comprehensive overview of methodologies in translation studies, including both well-established and more recent approaches.
The Handbook is organised into three sections, the first of which covers methodological issues in the two main paradigms to have emerged from within translation studies, namely skopos theory and descriptive translation studies. The second section covers multidisciplinary perspectives in research methodology and considers their application in translation research. The third section deals with practical and pragmatic methodological issues. Each chapter provides a summary of relevant research, a literature overview, critical issues and topics, recommendations for best practice, and some suggestions for further reading.
Bringing together over 30 eminent international scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, this Handbook is essential reading for all students and scholars involved in translation methodology and research.
Este trabajo aborda una revisión del tema de la musealización del arte y la historia en exposiciones y museos. Se ha realizado una revisión bibliográfica sistematizada basada en publicaciones de revistas científicas internacionales indexadas en los tres primeros cuartiles del SJR, del periodo de 2015 a 2021. La muestra comprende 267 artículos. Se han abordado dos niveles de análisis: descriptivo, basado en variables independientes del año de publicación, nombre de las revistas, índice de indexación, editorial, lugar de publicación y autoría; e interpretativo, basado en variables dependientes de los temas y contenidos de la muestra. Se han utilizado dos técnicas de análisis cualitativo: de clasificación y reducción de datos por codificación, y análisis de contenidos, utilizando la herramienta informática de Atlas.ti 8. En los resultados se muestran las características descriptivas de los artículos analizados, según variables independientes, y los resultados de temas y contenidos principales (comunicación, inclusión, TIC y participación). La discusión de los resultados y conclusiones abordan una revisión crítica sobre las características de cada tema y aportan información sobre los retos futuros para la musealización del arte y la historia en exposiciones y museos. ____________CÓMO CITAR: Tirado-de la Chica, A (2021). La Musealización del Arte y la Historia: estrategias discursivas y de comunicación, inclusión, transformación digital y participación en museos. REIDOCREA, 10(35), 1-18. http://doi.org/10.30827/Digibug.70949
Multisensory information has been shown to facilitate learning (However, although research has examined the modulating effect of unisensory and multisensory distractors on multisensory processing, the extent to which a concurrent unisensory or multisensory cognitive load task would interfere with or support multisensory learning remains unclear. This study examined the role of concurrent task modality on incidental category learning in 6-to 10-year-olds. Participants were engaged in a multisensory learning task whilst also performing either a unisensory (visual or auditory only) or multisensory (audiovisual) concurrent task (CT). We found that engaging in an auditory CT led to poorer performance on incidental category learning compared with an audiovisual or visual CT, across groups. In 6-year-olds, category test performance was at chance in the auditory-only CT condition, suggesting auditory concurrent tasks may interfere with learning in younger children, but the addition of visual information may serve to focus attention. These findings provide novel insight into the use of multisensory concurrent information on incidental learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development and developmental changes in modality dominance and ability to switch flexibly across modalities are discussed.
Within a museum context, audio description (AD) is generally thought to be a tool for enhancing access for people with a visual impairment, in other words, as a means of providing access, through verbal description, to visual details of an object or artwork. Taking evidence from researchers and practitioners, we argue that AD has a much broader potential scope and benefit. We consider AD in more established fields, such as film, and then explore the issues impacting on AD within museum environments. We also explore the literature on multisensory learning and memory, to create a rationale for the benefits of AD based on multisensory imagery, with or without perceptual experience. We conclude that, through the use of imagery, AD has the potential to guide people around a painting or object in a way which can enhance the ‘seeing’ ability of all people, whether or not they have sight. Further, multisensory experience, based on imagery or perceptual experience, combined with semantic or fact information, would enhance memorability. As such, taking AD from the niche audience of visual impairment, and projecting it into the mass market of the ‘sighted’, could have a revolutionary impact on the museum experience and our understanding of access and difference.
What would it be like to step into a painting? Do you know what a painting feels like? Does it make a sound? How does it smell?
These questions attracted over 60 families to Ektashif: Art through the Senses. The programme, which took place at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, revolved around the concept of a ‘sensory toolkit’. Designed to provide an un-facilitated gallery experience, in which families can explore art in new ways together, the programme and toolkit were developed as part of a collaborative research project. This involved curators and educators from Qatar Museums (QM) joining forces with researchers from the University of Westminster in London and Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Doha. Combining expertise in museum studies, curatorial practice, cognitive psychology, and audiovisual translation, the project was grounded in multisensory learning and inclusive design.
The authors discuss the principles of “access for all” in museums, both physical and intellectual access. They explore this question of multisensory processing in neurologically typical individuals, and case studies of two Portuguese museums that experimented with implementation of an “access for all” approach to the presentation of their permanent collections. The study was designed with three phases: addressing architectural barriers to access, preparation of accessible information about space and objects, and testing of alternative formats to convey this information to learn how to meet diverse needs in different ways. Set in the context of research on multisensory learning, this article discusses why an access for all principle is a majority issue as well as a moral and legal concept. It discusses two case studies where an “access for all” museological approach has been applied to access to the collections, with differing success. The discussion focuses on how an “access for all” approach could enhance learning, long-term memorability and the ‘cultural value’ of a museum experience for all visitors.
Conventional wisdom among museum professionals is that art museum visitors do not spend much time viewing works of art. The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate that question as well as to look at the relationship that age, gender, and group size have on viewing times. Visitors to The Metropolitan Museum of Art were observed as they looked at six masterpieces in the Museum's collection. A total of 150 individuals looking at six paintings comprised the sample for the study. The observations were of naturally occurring stops at the works of art. The gender, group size, estimated age, and time spent at the work of art were recorded for each encounter. The mean time spent viewing a work of art was found to be 27.2 seconds, with a median time of 17.0 seconds. Viewing time was not related to gender or age, but was strongly related to group size, with larger groups spending more time. There were also significant differences among paintings. Results are discussed in terms of how different types of looking patterns may be related to the amount of time spent in front of works of art.
Although we live in a multisensory world, children's memory has been usually studied concentrating on only one sensory modality at a time. In this study, we investigated how audiovisual encoding affects recognition memory. Children (n = 114) from three age groups (8, 10 and 12 years) memorized auditory or visual stimuli presented with a semantically congruent, incongruent or non-semantic stimulus in the other modality during encoding. Subsequent recognition memory performance was better for auditory or visual stimuli initially presented together with a semantically congruent stimulus in the other modality than for stimuli accompanied by a non-semantic stimulus in the other modality. This congruency effect was observed for pictures presented with sounds, for sounds presented with pictures, for spoken words presented with pictures and for written words presented with spoken words. The present results show that semantically congruent multisensory experiences during encoding can improve memory performance in school-aged children.
Children's museums across the country work very hard to help children learn through play. The need to cultivate parent involvement in children's museum experiences has become central to these efforts as an increasing amount of literature identifies the benefits to children's learning when parents act as play facilitators. However, a visitor study conducted at Please Touch Museum, which explored parents' perceptions of play and their role in children's museums, along with literature in the field, identify three main barriers to parent involvement: (1) most parents lack a clear understanding of the learning benefits of play in children's museums; (2) parents lack confidence in, and knowledge of, how to play with their children in a children's museum; and (3) the nature and design of children's museums may not fully encourage and facilitate parent involvement.
When viewing a painting, artists perceive more information from the painting on the basis of their experience and knowledge than art novices do. This difference can be reflected in eye scan paths during viewing of paintings. Distributions of scan paths of artists are different from those of novices even when the paintings contain no figurative object (i.e. abstract paintings). There are two possible explanations for this difference of scan paths. One is that artists have high sensitivity to high-level features such as textures and composition of colors and therefore their fixations are more driven by such features compared with novices. The other is that fixations of artists are more attracted by salient features than those of novices and the fixations are driven by low-level features. To test these, we measured eye fixations of artists and novices during the free viewing of various abstract paintings and compared the distribution of their fixations for each painting with a topological attentional map that quantifies the conspicuity of low-level features in the painting (i.e. saliency map). We found that the fixation distribution of artists was more distinguishable from the saliency map than that of novices. This difference indicates that fixations of artists are less driven by low-level features than those of novices. Our result suggests that artists may extract visual information from paintings based on high-level features. This ability of artists may be associated with artists’ deep aesthetic appreciation of paintings.
The experience of art emerges from the interaction of various cognitive and affective processes. The unfolding of these processes in time and their relation with viewing behavior, however, is still poorly understood. Here we examined the effect of context on the relation between the experience of art and viewing time, the most basic indicator of viewing behavior. Two groups of participants viewed an art exhibition in one of two contexts: one in the museum, the other in the laboratory. In both cases viewing time was recorded with a mobile eye tracking system. After freely viewing the exhibition, participants rated each artwork on liking, interest, understanding, and ambiguity scales. Our results show that participants in the museum context liked artworks more, found them more interesting, and viewed them longer than those in the laboratory. Analyses with mixed effects models revealed that aesthetic appreciation (compounding liking and interest), understanding, and ambiguity predicted viewing time for artworks and for their corresponding labels. The effect of aesthetic appreciation and ambiguity on viewing time was modulated by context: Whereas art appreciation tended to predict viewing time better in the laboratory than in museum context, the relation between ambiguity and viewing time was positive in the museum and negative in the laboratory context. Our results suggest that art museums foster an enduring and focused aesthetic experience and demonstrate that context modulates the relation between art experience and viewing behavior.
Thematic analysis is a poorly demarcated, rarely acknowledged, yet widely used qualitative analytic method within psychology. In this paper, we argue that it offers an accessible and theoretically flexible approach to analysing qualitative data. We outline what thematic analysis is, locating it in relation to other qualitative analytic methods that search for themes or patterns, and in relation to different epistemological and ontological positions. We then provide clear guidelines to those wanting to start thematic analysis, or conduct it in a more deliberate and rigorous way, and consider potential pitfalls in conducting thematic analysis. Finally, we outline the disadvantages and advantages of thematic analysis. We conclude by advocating thematic analysis as a useful and flexible method for qualitative research in and beyond psychology.
This research models the interrelationship of service quality, perceived value for time and money, and satisfaction to establish a system of relationships that predicts repurchase intention and repeat visits in museums. With increased competition from many leisure pursuits and dwindling funding, museums have more constraints in managing and designing customer retention programs. As a sector that ranges in offerings from large diverse public museums to small themed regional venues, research into visitor behavior offers support for the sector. Even though some museum managers are moving to marketing focused approach, the focus on custodianship is the legacy of many smaller and underfunded museum offerings. Although, a system of relationships including quality value and repurchase have been explored in other contexts, knowledge of the predictors of customer judgments in repurchase intention in a service paradigm is undeveloped in the museums sector. This article applies a model previously tested in the cultural arts, to identify whether the findings are replicated or whether explicit idiosyncratic effects exist for each context. A survey instrument customized to the museum sector was administered to a sample of 412 past and present museum visitors and examined using structural equation modeling. Results indicate that customers determine their repurchase intention based on the quality dimensions of the experience and perceived value for time and money rather than customer satisfaction. Unlike most other repurchase intention research there is no direct relationship of customer satisfaction to repurchase intention suggesting that customer satisfaction is a single transactional measure in a museum context. A patron is satisfied with each single event with this unlikely to contribute to the intent to visit at another time. It is evident that the decision to revisit is based on the value, quality, and utility created by the event in the consumer's mind. This is the first known article testing and presenting this system of relationships in the museum context.
From children's own perspective, play and learning are not always separate in practices during early years. The purpose of this article is, first, to scrutinise the background and character of early years education in terms of play and learning. Second, to elaborate the findings of several years of research about children's learning in preschool related to the curriculum of early years education and, finally, to propose a sustainable pedagogy for the future, which does not separate play from learning but draws upon the similarities in character in order to promote creativity in future generations. Introducing the notions of act and object of learning and play (by act we mean how children play and learn and with the object we mean what children play and learn) we will chisel out an alternative early childhood education approach, here called developmental pedagogy, based on recent research in the field of play and learning, but also related to earlier approaches to early education.
Natural objects provide partially redundant information to the brain through different sensory modalities. For example, voices and faces both give information about the speech content, age, and gender of a person. Thanks to this redundancy, multimodal recognition is fast, robust, and automatic. In unimodal perception, however, only part of the information about an object is available. Here, we addressed whether, even under conditions of unimodal sensory input, crossmodal neural circuits that have been shaped by previous associative learning become activated and underpin a performance benefit. We measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging before, while, and after participants learned to associate either sensory redundant stimuli, i.e. voices and faces, or arbitrary multimodal combinations, i.e. voices and written names, ring tones, and cell phones or brand names of these cell phones. After learning, participants were better at recognizing unimodal auditory voices that had been paired with faces than those paired with written names, and association of voices with faces resulted in an increased functional coupling between voice and face areas. No such effects were observed for ring tones that had been paired with cell phones or names. These findings demonstrate that brief exposure to ecologically valid and sensory redundant stimulus pairs, such as voices and faces, induces specific multisensory associations. Consistent with predictive coding theories, associative representations become thereafter available for unimodal perception and facilitate object recognition. These data suggest that for natural objects effective predictive signals can be generated across sensory systems and proceed by optimization of functional connectivity between specialized cortical sensory modules.
In two sessions with free scanning and memory instructions, eye-movement patterns from nine artists were compared with those of nine artistically untrained participants viewing 16 pictures representing a selection of categories from ordinary scenes to abstraction: 12 pictures were made to accommodate an object-oriented viewing mode (selection of recognisable objects), and a pictorial viewing mode (selection of more structural features), and 4 were abstract. The artistically untrained participants showed preference for viewing human features and objects, while the artists spent more scanning time on structural/abstract features. A group by session interaction showed a change of viewing strategy in the artists, who viewed more objects and human features in the memory task session. A verbal test of recall memory showed no overall difference in the number of pictures remembered, but the number of correctly remembered pictorial features was significantly higher for artists than for the artistically untrained viewers, irrespective of picture type. No differences in fixation frequencies/durations were found between groups across sessions, but a significant task-dependent-group by session interaction of fixation frequency/duration showed that the artistically untrained participants demonstrated repetition effects in fewer, longer fixations with repeated viewing, while the opposite pattern obtained for the artists.
The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement describes the benefits of interest for people of all ages. Using case material as illustrations, the volume explains that interest can be supported to develop, and that the development of a person’s interest is always motivating and results in meaningful engagement. This volume is written for people who would like to know more about the power of their interests and how they could develop them: students who want to be engaged, educators and parents wondering about how to facilitate motivation, business people focusing on ways in which they could engage their employees and associates, policy-makers whose recognition of the power of interest may lead to changes resulting in a new focus supporting interest development for schools, out of school activity, industry, and business, and researchers studying learning and motivation. It draws on research in cognitive, developmental, educational, and social psychology, as well as in the learning sciences, and neuroscience to demonstrate that there is power for everyone in leveraging interest for motivation and engagement.
This study investigates motivational dimensions for membership in a non-profit art museum and their relationship with membership levels. Data was collected from existing members of a not-for-profit museum. The findings indicated that museum membership motivation is a multidimensional construct including philanthropy, preservation of art, social recognition, children’s benefits, tangible benefits, and hedonic dimensions. Of these, social recognition and philanthropy differ significantly across membership levels with high-end members having higher scores than others. Children’s benefits and tangible member benefits demonstrate the opposite effect-low-end members are significantly more motivated by this factor. Preservation of art and hedonic dimensions do not differ across membership levels. As regards segmentation variables, only income had a significant influence on membership level. As regards motivational factors, gender, age, and income produced mixed results. The implications of these findings are explored for both academic and managerial perspectives.
Short- and long-term interest-driven participation in scientific practices is observed in a variety of settings, such as classrooms, museums, and the fields of amateur astronomy. Yet, because each such setting has a distinct character (e.g., some are more open-ended and person-centered), interest-driven participation is qualitatively different across settings. The central argument of this chapter is that in order to design environments for truly interest-driven pursuits in science practices, in- and out-of-schools, we would benefit immensely from thoroughly understanding how interests are sparked and developed in different settings in which such practices play a central role. The idea is that, when looked across settings and practices, different “versions” of interest-driven participation show both similar and contrasting characteristics and dynamics. By uncovering dimensions of interest-related phenomena that are common across these settings, then, we find convergent evidence regarding the very nature of interests and how best to spark and sustain them. Based on the research literature and my own empirical work on an after-school program and the hobby of model rocketry, here I begin to map out some of the core similarities in the phenomenology of interest-driven participation across various settings of scientific practices. Specifically, I list four similarities: (a) interest-driven pursuits show a high degree of idiosyncratic, tailored activity; (b) such activities are broadly topic-inclusive, rather than narrowly topic-focused; (c) dynamically, interest-driven participation shows many shifts and turns in the object of pursuit; and (d) sustained interest-driven participation rests on individuals having enough time to find hooks for their developing interests. Based on these findings, I then draw some lessons for the design of learning environments (both formal and informal) that can spark and sustain people’s interest-driven engagement with science.
Adult and child visitors (N = 33 groups) participated in a study of interactions with one another and with artifacts at a children's museum. The study focused on differences in types of engagement based on the exhibits in which the artifacts were embedded (a grocery store exhibit vs. a water table exhibit). Results from a series of partial correlations demonstrated that some types of engagement varied significantly by exhibit, age of child participants, and child-to-adult ratio. Also, from the start to the end of an interaction, social interactions declined among 14 groups whereas child–artifact interactions increased (following a pattern of Vygotskian internalization). These results contribute to understanding the physical and social ecology of children's use of artifacts and may inform museum exhibit design.
This review presents atmospherics as a potential model for studying the interplay between visitors and the exhibition environment in informal learning settings such as museums. Atmospherics posits that the environment influences affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses, and that these responses can be shaped by design cues in the environment (Kotler, 1974). Atmospherics and the related model of the servicescape have informed research in a variety of retail, leisure, and entertainment settings (Chang & Horng, 2010; Turley & Milliman, 2000). Applying the atmospherics model to the museum environment has considerable potential for extending our understanding of the role that the exhibition environment plays in the museum visitor experience, and informing the design of informal learning settings.
The widening of roles and expectations within cultural policy discourses has been a challenge to museum workers throughout Great Britain. There has been an expectation that museums are changing from an ‘old’ to a ‘new museology’ that has shaped museum functions and roles. This paper outlines the limitations of this perceived transition as museum services confront multiple exogenous and endogenous expectations, opportunities, pressures and threats. Findings from 23 publically funded museum services across England, Scotland and Wales are presented to explore the roles of professional and hierarchical differentiation, and how there were organisational and managerial limitations to the practical application of the ‘new museology’. The ambiguity surrounding policy, roles and practice also highlighted that museum workers were key agents in interpreting, using and understanding wide-ranging policy expectations. The practical implementation of the ‘new museology’ is linked to the values held by museum workers themselves and how they relate it to their activities at the ground level.
Visitor studies including studies of experience and expectations of visitors are important for museums in terms of management and development, however few studies have been designed to explore the components of experience expectations for museum visitors. This research tried to analyze the experience expectations of museum visitors. Using content analysis of diaries written by museum visitors, a questionnaire of experience expectations of museum visitors was developed. After a survey with 425 valid returns, factor analysis was used to extract 5 types of experience expectations, which included: easiness and fun, cultural entertainment, personal identification, historical reminiscences, and escapism. Moreover, this research analyzed visitors’ preferences for visiting museums and their demographic factors among different types of experience expectations. Finally, some related discussion and suggestions were proposed.
This paper analyses the different factors influencing the intention to revisit a cultural attraction with an application to the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art (MART) in Rovereto, Italy. The empirical data were obtained from a survey undertaken in 2009 and a zero-truncated count data model is estimated. The findings reveal that sociodemographic characteristics positively influence the probability to return to the museum. Also, as reported in other studies, the temporary exhibitions offered by the museum have a significant impact with an incidence rate ratio almost twice as high. No matter how much visitors spend on accommodation, they are less likely to revisit if they travel in groups, by train or on foot, are far from their town of origin and have spent a long time visiting the museum.
This study attempts to gain information concerning the receptive, as opposed to the creative, aesthetic experience by talking to museum professionals who spend their working lives identifying, appraising, and explicating works of art. The study is based on an underlying assumption that rules and practices for looking at art exist and must be mastered if success is to ensue. The anthropological research approach uses semi-structured interviews and subjects the responses to systematic analysis. Major conclusions emphasize the unity and diversity of the aesthetic experience. The structure of the aesthetic experience is found to be an intense involvement of attention in response to a visual stimulus, for no other reason than to sustain the interaction. The experiential consequences of such a deep and autotelic involvement are an intense enjoyment characterized by feelings of personal wholeness, a sense of discovery, and a sense of human connectedness. The aesthetic content requires two sets of preconditions that make the experience possible: the challenges contained in the object and the skills of the viewer. While the structure of the aesthetic experience is rated similar in terms by all the respondents, the challenges, or content stimuli that triggers the experience vary considerably. These challenges of art are the formal structure of the work, its emotional impact, the intellectual references it carries, and the opportunities it creates for a dialogue among the artist, his time, and the viewer. Without this content challenge there would be nothing to arrest the viewer, and consequently no experience. Level of skill is critical. Challenges and skill must be nearly in balance for the attention to become focused. A complex work of art will engage only a person who has developed complex visual skills. The book is divided into six chapters and concludes with appendices. "Interview Questions for Museum Professionals" and "Aesthetic Experience Questionnaire Form." Contains approximately 100 references. (MM)
In changing times older art-museum values are coming under challenge and new emphasis is being placed on museum-audience relationships. The professional development of new communicative approaches in art museums can be seen as a form of action research. Older modernist models for communication based on the transmission of authoritative subject-based facts to a mass of passive receivers are being superseded by new approaches that acknowledge 'active audiences', constructivist and interpretist learning theories and the complexities of cultural politics. New roles for art museum professionals, the concept of differentiated audiences, the intervention of new voices and the exposition of new narratives offer possibilities for the reconceptualisation of art museums that are rooted in late 19th-century modernist culture.
This article details the application of the microeconomic appraisal technique, Choice Experiment (CE), to an art gallery setting to investigate and estimate the value visitors place on various attributes of galleries. A questionnaire requiring visitors to make choices between scenarios containing various predetermined options for the layout and content of two art galleries in northeast England was administered. This allowed the tradeoffs that respondents were prepared to make between different gallery options to be estimated, and subsequently the utility visitors derived from these different elements. The results show that CE can be used to obtain estimates for visitor utility and satisfaction from various gallery layouts. The methodology thus has a potential use in the management of galleries and museums. The tailoring of art galleries and museums to improve visitor experience and provide increased visitor satisfaction is becoming increasingly important, as these cultural resources are essential components of leisure and tourism markets.
The gap between the potential for works of art in museums to offer unique experiences, and the actual outcomes of visitor encounters, highlights the importance of the cultural competence of museum visitors. However, when applied to museum visiting, cultural competence should be primarily treated as perceptual and cognitive—one needs to exercise the perceptual activities that works of art require in order for a museum visit to register as some form of satisfying experience. The main part of the paper is devoted to discussion of some aspects of the perceptual basis of cultural competence required for perception of works of art—the problem of attention, the misplaced dichotomy of 'museum viewing' versus 'everyday perception', and the problem of defining the current cognitive style. It is argued that one of the greatest challenges to the museological profession is the problem of how to engage the complex issues of perception, vision and subjective experience more properly in the museological discourse, so that they can be reflected in theories of presentation and interpretation. q 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Museums, art galleries, botanical gardens, national parks, science centers, zoos, aquaria and historic sites are important public learning institutions. The free-choice learning offered in these settings is closely linked to visitors' intrinsic motivation, making it important to understand the motivational factors that impact on visitors' experiences. This paper presents data from a questionnaire administered to visitors at three sites: a museum, an art gallery, and an aquarium. Similarities and differences among the sites are reported in relation to visitors' expectations, perceptions of learning opportunities, engagement in motivated learning behaviors, and perceptions of the learning experience. The importance of learning to museum visitors and the unique opportunities and challenges of the museum in relation to other educational leisure settings are discussed. The authors argue that the study of motivational factors might contribute to the development of a common theoretical foundation for interpretation in museums and other informal learning settings.
This paper examines current trends in family studies research, details the methodological and topical perspectives that are emerging, and reflects on how these findings could be integrated to provide a more coherent approach to researching the leisure, learning and recreational aspects of family visitors to art museums. Research findings from disciplines such as sociology, ethnography, education, design and marketing are of interest to the field of visitor studies, and this paper contributes to the wider research agenda by providing an overview of family research methods from a range of other disciplines, as well as those used within visitor studies.
Over the last decade, there has been a growth of research in family learning in science museums, leading to an emerging disciplinary matrix, whilst many aspects of family visits to art museums remain relatively unexplored. The paper discusses the problems of gathering meaningful data from adults and children in family groups, and concludes by suggesting that a challenge for art museums is to learn from what is happening in other areas of cultural research into families, and to develop a framework for research which builds on the methodological strengths and practical experience of robust studies.
Studies of learning, and in particular perceptual learning, have focused on learning of stimuli consisting of a single sensory modality. However, our experience in the world involves constant multisensory stimulation. For instance, visual and auditory information are integrated in performing many tasks that involve localizing and tracking moving objects. Therefore, it is likely that the human brain has evolved to develop, learn and operate optimally in multisensory environments. We suggest that training protocols that employ unisensory stimulus regimes do not engage multisensory learning mechanisms and, therefore, might not be optimal for learning. However, multisensory-training protocols can better approximate natural settings and are more effective for learning.
Past multisensory experiences can influence current unisensory processing and memory performance. Repeated images are better discriminated if initially presented as auditory-visual pairs, rather than only visually. An experience's context thus plays a role in how well repetitions of certain aspects are later recognized. Here, we investigated factors during the initial multisensory experience that are essential for generating improved memory performance. Subjects discriminated repeated versus initial image presentations intermixed within a continuous recognition task. Half of initial presentations were multisensory, and all repetitions were only visual. Experiment 1 examined whether purely episodic multisensory information suffices for enhancing later discrimination performance by pairing visual objects with either tones or vibrations. We could therefore also assess whether effects can be elicited with different sensory pairings. Experiment 2 examined semantic context by manipulating the congruence between auditory and visual object stimuli within blocks of trials. Relative to images only encountered visually, accuracy in discriminating image repetitions was significantly impaired by auditory-visual, yet unaffected by somatosensory-visual multisensory memory traces. By contrast, this accuracy was selectively enhanced for visual stimuli with semantically congruent multisensory pasts and unchanged for those with semantically incongruent multisensory pasts. The collective results reveal opposing effects of purely episodic versus semantic information from auditory-visual multisensory events. Nonetheless, both types of multisensory memory traces are accessible for processing incoming stimuli and indeed result in distinct visual object processing, leading to either impaired or enhanced performance relative to unisensory memory traces. We discuss these results as supporting a model of object-based multisensory interactions.
Numerous studies show that practice can result in performance improvements on low-level visual perceptual tasks [1-5]. However, such learning is characteristically difficult and slow, requiring many days of training [6-8]. Here, we show that a multisensory audiovisual training procedure facilitates visual learning and results in significantly faster learning than unisensory visual training. We trained one group of subjects with an audiovisual motion-detection task and a second group with a visual motion-detection task, and compared performance on trials containing only visual signals across ten days of training. Whereas observers in both groups showed improvements of visual sensitivity with training, subjects trained with multisensory stimuli showed significantly more learning both within and across training sessions. These benefits of multisensory training are particularly surprising given that the learning of visual motion stimuli is generally thought to be mediated by low-level visual brain areas [6, 9, 10]. Although crossmodal interactions are ubiquitous in human perceptual processing [11-13], the contribution of crossmodal information to perceptual learning has not been studied previously. Our results show that multisensory interactions can be exploited to yield more efficient learning of sensory information and suggest that multisensory training programs would be most effective for the acquisition of new skills.
Mixed methods research. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods
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Brannen, J. (2005). Mixed methods research. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods.
Retrieved from http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/89/1/MethodsReviewPaperNCRM-005.pdf
Pictures painted in words. ADLAB Audio Description Guidelines
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Managing the new museology: The management of Australian museums (Doctoral thesis
- C Baddeley
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(Doctoral thesis, University of Canberra, Bruce, Australia). Retrieved from http://www.
canberra.edu.au/researchrepository/items/96e61dc0-e3df-a74b-8824-92318ee75602/1/
Attention and value: Keys to understanding museum visitors
- S Bitgood
Bitgood, S. (2016). Attention and value: Keys to understanding museum visitors. London, UK:
Routledge.
Cultural diversity: Politics, policy and practices. The case of Tate Encounters
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The case of Tate Encounters. In Museums, equality and social justice: Museum meanings (pp.
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Perspectives on object-centered learning in museums
- K A Morrissey
Morrissey, K. A. (2002). Pathways among objects and museum. In S. G. Paris (Ed.), Perspectives
on object-centered learning in museums (pp. 258-272). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Enriched descriptive guides: A case for collaborative meaning-making in museums
- J Neves
Neves, J. (2016). Enriched descriptive guides: A case for collaborative meaning-making in museums. Cultus: The Intercultural Journal of Mediation and Communication, 9, 137-154.
Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood
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in a multisensory environment across childhood. Developmental Science, 54, 1020-1028. doi:
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The artist as educator: Examining relationships between art practice and pedagogy in the gallery context
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Pringle, E. (2009). The artist as educator: Examining relationships between art practice and pedagogy in the gallery context. Tate Papers, 11.
Methods for studying family visitors in art museums: A cross-disciplinary review of current research. Museum Management and Curatorship
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Inside the white cube: The ideology of the gallery space
- B O'doherty
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University of California Press.
Toward some cartographic understanding of art interpretation in museums
- C Whitehead
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Abingdon, UK: Routledge.