As promised, I would like to first dive a little bit into behavior of visitors in museums. To do so, I will review the article called “Art Perception in the Museum: How We Spend Time and Space in Art Exhibitions”, the present study aimed to replicate and expand on the study of Smith and Smith (2001).The main aim was to analyse museum visitors’ behaviour in terms of viewing duration and distance, how often people returned to a painting and how behaviour changed throughout such reassessments.
Keypoints of the “Smith and Smith” study
In their 2001 study, Smith and Smith provided foundational research into the impact of factors like age, gender, and group size on viewing times in museums. They discovered that museumgoers typically spend significantly more time observing artworks—27.2 seconds longer on average—than in controlled lab experiments, where viewing times are often under three seconds.
The study also brought attention to the role of viewing distance, noting that visitors intuitively adjust their proximity to artworks based on personal preferences, unlike the fixed distances common in lab studies. These insights underline the importance of replicating natural museum behavior in experimental settings to better understand art perception.
Lastly, Smith and Smith emphasized the social dynamics of museum visits, observing that a substantial portion of visitors attended in groups. Roughly 19.3% came with one other person, and 3.3% were in groups of three, transforming art observation into a collective social event. This group interaction was noted to influence the overall art experience, highlighting how social contexts can shift perception from individual to shared engagement.
Methods of the “Art Perception in the Museum” study
They tested a total of 225 visitors (126 female, M(age) = 43.3 years) attending the special exhibition on Gerhard Richter by unobtrusively observing them from a balcony above, which was barely detectable by typical visitors; 104 people visited the paintings on their own (category single), 100 visited them with one other person (category pair), 11 in a group (category group) of two or more, and 10 with their children (category family—here the children were not observed further, but a focus was set to the person who first attended the respective artwork). A total of four persons attended the exhibition with a wheelchair, two with a folding chair, and one with a walking stick; no other accessories in this respect were recorded. None of the participants detected the observers and so were naïve to the purpose of the study.
The six paintings which were utilized for the study were all positioned side by side on one wall of the only hall in the entire exhibition; the two observers assessing visitor behaviour were situated on a balcony above the hall overseeing the entire scene of interest. On the floor, the tile sizes were exactly 50 × 50 cm, allowing the easy assessment of viewing distance between visitor and painting with a resolution of 50 cm accordingly.
To record visitor behavior, the researchers used a custom Android app on Sony tablet PCs. This app enabled quick and precise data collection, such as viewing distance in 0.5-meter increments (aligned with the floor tiles), timing of observations, and demographic details like gender, age, and whether visitors were accompanied or used mobility aids. Observers could track individuals revisiting paintings, building a comprehensive history of their interactions. This method ensured accurate, intuitive data logging while maintaining naturalistic observations.
Two observers were located on the balcony, with Observer 2 assisting the experimenter Observer 1, who entered the data. This was done first of all to ensure objective data entry and was also used for tracing visitors who might potentially come back. The observers tried to focus on single visitors to capture their entire viewing behaviour with regard to the paintings under observation. This made it necessary to test single, randomly chosen persons in depth, so the duration of the total testing was considerably long as many visitors take quite a while to wander through the whole exhibition.
Results
Viewing Time of Artworks
People were found to spend very different amounts of time in front of different artworks, here between 25.7 s and 41.0 s on average—note: although the exact durations differed from the Smith and Smith study, they also documented such a various viewing behaviour with a range of viewing duration from 13.2 s to 44.6 s.
Visitors viewed the artworks quite selectively, omitting 2.5 out of the given range of six pictures—a clear sign of selective viewing behaviour even in a special art exhibition showing a very limited number of paintings.
In contrast to Smith and Smith, they did not find any substantial differences among group sizes. Category single visitors showed a mean viewing duration at first attendance of 35.6 s, category pair showed 31.4 s, group showed 36.5 s, and family showed 36.4 s. In accordance with the Smith and Smith study, we could not find any significant difference between female (M = 34.6 s) and male visitors (M = 32.7 s).
Given this total viewing time perspective, visitors spent 50.5 s on one artwork. In fact, visitors who viewed an artwork at least once showed a 51% probability of returning to it at least once more.
Viewing Distance From Artworks
Regarding the different viewing distances at which visitors choose to inspect the paintings, we again observed that conditions were very different to the typical ones employed in lab research. On average, the visitors in the present study distanced themselves from a painting M = 1.72 m across all viewings, which was not substantially different from the distance they used when only initial viewings were analysed (M = 1.75 m). First of all, the essential difference between a museum and a lab context is mainly that a museum offers enough space for visitors to choose their personal distance from an artwork. On what basis visitors choose their distance remains unclear, but it is seemingly done by intuition without any deeper rationale behind it. This intuition seems to have a basis in the extension of the artwork, here the canvas size: The larger the artwork the more viewing space is chosen.
Sociality factor
One great difference between a museum context and a lab setting is the typical presence of many people in the same hall, the sociality factor. We indeed detected an effect of group which was very compatible with the obtained effect of the Smith and Smith study: Pairs of visitors took longer viewing times, often because they debated on the painting, but more than two persons attending a painting together even outperformed pairs. The additional categorization of family showed the shortest viewing times—probably due to ongoing caretaking issues, especially for parents with small children.
Conclusion
Once again, the present study made clear that viewing artworks in a museum context is very different to a typical lab setting: First of all, visitors of art museums invest money, time, and intellectual effort beforehand to get to the exhibition hall, they show more skills and motivation to deeply process artworks, and, screening the demographics of typical visitors, they are mostly older and possess more knowledge of art and so also show different heuristics in assessing the quality of art. Second, the whole social setting is very different with people walking around in a relatively silent and focused—but still communicative and interactive—way. Third, the viewing distances from paintings is very different, typically larger. Fourth, the viewing duration is also self-chosen and fundamentally (much) longer than in typical lab settings.
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