Do curators’ decisions about visual elements have an impact on knowledge acquisition in digital art exhibitions? It is analyzed from the perspective of human cognitive processing

Abstract

In the field of art, exhibitions are used to draw the audience into a state of active appreciation and knowledge acquisition through immersive and interesting interactions that include rich visual situations. There is evidence that there are individual differences in the way people inherently search, process, analyze, understand, store, and retrieve visual information from their surroundings, and that these differences are ireflected in their per- formance, experience, effectiveness, and efficiency in these environments. Although curators tend to provide learning experiences in such contexts, current art exhibition design and evaluation practices take little account of the viewer’s individual differences in visual information processing. This can be attributed to deficiencies in understanding and predicting the impact of the audience’s visual behavior, interactive behavior, and cognitive style on knowledge acquisition in art exhibitions, resulting in inadequate approaches to creating cognitive-cen- tered audience models, and insufficient ability to actually consider these human cognitive factors in current state-of-the-art design and evaluation methods. To bridge this gap, we have selected three known art exhibition projects.The Digital Art exhibition adopted a credible cognitive style theory and conducted three independent evaluative user studies (N = 149) over a 6-month period, following an inter-subject, eye-tracking based ex- perimental design.The results of the evaluation study show that curators’ visual search decisions inadvertently favor users with specific cognitive characteristics, influencing their visual behavior and thus game behavior, leading to differences in knowledge acquisition.Conclusion:The results of the evaluation study also revealed the correlated effects of individual differences in visual information processing, user visual behavior strategies, and interactive behavior during the exhibition. These findings require that cognitive features be considered as assessment and design factors when providing art exhibition activities based on visual search tasks. This con- sideration will help us to better understand and interpret different approaches to information processing in the context of digital art, and drive the design of adaptive mechanisms to provide personalized exhibition activities that meet the unique cognitive needs of the audience.

CCS Concepts: Human-centered Computing → Human-Computer Interaction (HCI; Social and professional topics → User characteristics;