Presenting TaMuNaBe: A taxonomy of museum navigation behaviors.

Abstract

In order to accurately study in situ aesthetic responses as participants explore gallery spaces and museum exhibitions, we need a way to comprehensively, exhaustively, and precisely classify the behaviors displayed in such settings. We have restructured and extended a preliminary taxonomy of museum navigation behavior to give it a hierarchical structure and precise behavioral criteria. Our taxonomy features categories for both art related and non-art related eye-gaze behaviors. Art Gazes are further categorized as Orientation behaviors, which do not require bodily movement, or Changing Perspective behaviors, which do require bodily movement. This taxonomy, consisting of 32 different behaviors, was developed using mobile eye-tracking data collected with Tobii glasses at the Pieter Vermeersch exhibition at the M Museum in Leuven. The four-room exhibition featured contemporary artworks primarily consisting of marble slabs painted with color gradients, as well as large, architectural installation features. Three raters coded the mobile eye-tracking recordings according to the taxonomical criteria. Four participants' gaze data were used to assess interrater reliability, using the correlation between the durations of taxonomical behaviors coded for each participant by each rater (r = .98) and Cohen's kappa for the agreed number of instances of taxonomical behaviors (k = .67). The taxonomy is both comprehensive and exhaustive in capturing the array of behaviors displayed by participants in the exposition. The use of this taxonomy, or increasingly refined versions of it, will enable us to assess specific behavioral processes which occur in naturalistic museum settings and which may influence aesthetic appreciation.

Colour, Pattern, Space and Time in Art Perception: Two Case Studies

“…level of expertise, familiarity with the artist's work). Here, we can only mention some of the findings resulting from these analyses (for more details, see the original paper by Linden & Wagemans, 2021). Third, there were no overall group differences in the major viewing behaviours as a function of gender, age, art expertise and interest in art.…”

“…In total, 109 participants volunteered to take part in this study (the majority highly educated and highly interested in art, 34 of whom were real art experts). As a first step, we have developed a taxonomy of navigation and viewing behaviours (Linden & Wagemans, 2021) to be able to code them in the video and eye-movement recordings (their occurrence and duration) and to analyse them as a function of the characteristics of the art works and of the visitors (e.g. level of expertise, familiarity with the artist's work).…”

How Do We Move in Front of Art? How Does This Relate to Art Experience? Linking Movement, Eye Tracking, Emotion, and Evaluations in a Gallery-Like Setting

“…Finally, beyond the above-identified aspects, a basic question involves whether these could be combined (Table A1, e ). This constitutes both a main aim and pressing issue when considering the body and movement (Linden & Wagemans, 2021), essentially asking whether—and how—we might address the global ways that people move in art spaces in front of specific works. One possibility would be to discern some shared, patterns of engagement ( e1 ) and then explore whether these connect to specific aspects of reported art experiences ( e2 ).…”

Predicting instabilities: an embodied perspective on unstable experiences with art and design

“…Especially in the case of perceptual indeterminacy / potentiality , embodied perceptual dynamics and ‘orienting behaviours’ [50] are central: we generally saccade to spots of the image that promise to be highly informative about the prediction (see also [3]). The conflict between these predictions (e.g.…”