Presenting TaMuNaBe: A Taxonomy of Museum Navigation Behaviors.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]