A STIMULATING MUSEUM SPACE: ‘Glancing away’ and engaging working memory in-between exhibits

Krukar J.

Abstract

How people react to artworks -how they look at them, what they feel, what they remember, what moves them -has been studied primarily in highly controlled, standardised, and isolated psychological laboratories. Yet the way most people ever experience art is vastly different: we walk in-between it, occasionally pause, look around. Challenging the view that this broad range of in-museum behaviour is a distraction to engaging with art, this chapter focuses on glancing away from individual exhibits. What happens when we look beyond a single artwork in a seemingly haphazard manner, and how do these acts contribute to our experience? The focus is put on two cognitive processes: visual attention (eye movement and peripheral vision) and visual working memory. The chapter explores how the spatial arrangement of exhibits in a museum may endorse the act of glancing away and thus stimulate visitors’ attention and working memory in ways that are not possible during static viewing of artworks outside such a dedicated space.