Art Immersion: Evidence for attention restoration in museums
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Visiting a museum, compared to walking in an urban environment, improves self-reported restoration. • Visiting a museum improves attentional control abilities, as measured via an Antisaccade task. • No differences in working memory, stress, or emotions between a museum visit and an urban walk. • No differences in eye metrics associated with mental load between a museum visit and an urban walk. Navigating crowded urban environments can significantly deplete attentional resources over time, making individuals less attentive and more prone to distractions. While previous research suggests that natural settings can help replenish attentional resources depleted by urban life, little is known about whether similar benefits may arise from tranquil artistic settings, like museums and art exhibitions. Here, we drew on the Attention Restoration Theory to test the restorative effects of a museum visit compared to a walk in an urban environment, using a within-subject pre-post design and a combination of self-reported, behavioral, and physiological measures. Participants completed two computer tasks assessing working memory and attentional control and filled out questionnaires assessing perceived restoration, emotions and stress before and after either a museum visit or an urban walk. Physiological activity was monitored by measuring blink rate and pupil size via an eye-tracker. Results showed greater improvement in attentional control abilities following the museum visit. Additionally, self-reported measures indicated that the museum visit was perceived as being more restorative than the urban walk. Similar improvements were observed for working memory, stress and emotions after both a museum visit and an urban walk. These findings suggest that immersion in artistic environments, like museums, can enhance key attention abilities more effectively than an urban walk, enabling individuals to replenish attention resources and become less distractible afterwards. Our results are encouraging in promoting the beneficial effects of museum visits on attention restoration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".