Article published In: Words in the World
Edited by Laura Teddiman, Lori Buchanan and Hamad Al-Azary
[The Mental Lexicon 19:1] 2024
► pp. 78–89
How words can guide our eyes
Increasing engagement with art through audio-guided visual search in young and older adults
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Goethe University Frankfurt.
Published online: 10 January 2025
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24024.vin
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24024.vin
Abstract
Pursuing cognitively stimulating activities, such as engaging with art, is crucial to a healthy lifestyle. The
current work simulates visits to an art museum in a laboratory setting. Using eye tracking, we explored how linguistically guided
visual search may increase attention, enjoyment and retention of information when viewing art. Two groups of adults, young (under
35 years) and older (over 65 years) viewed ten paintings on a computer screen presented either with or without an accompanying
audio-guide, while having their eye movements recorded. Audio-guides referred to specific areas of the painting, marked as
Interest Areas (IA). Across age groups, as attested by gaze fixations, the audio-guides increased attention to these areas
compared to free-viewing. Audio-guided viewing did not lead to a significantly increase over free-viewing in information recall
accuracy or feelings of enjoyment and engagement. Overall, older adults did report feeling more positively about both audio-guided
and free viewing than young adults. Thus, the use of audio-guides, specifically the gamification through linguistically guided
visual search, may be a useful tool to promote meaningful attentional interactions with art.
Keywords: visual search, eye movements, museum, audio-guide
Article outline
- Introduction
- Current study
- Methods
- Stimuli
- Procedure
- Participants
- Results
- Analysis
- Analysis 1: Self-reported engagement and enjoyment
- Analysis 2: Overall proportion of looks to interest areas (IAs)
- Analysis 3: Time course analysis of proportion of looks to interest areas (IAs)
- Analysis
- Discussion
- Notes
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