36 DECOLONIZING EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLIC COGNITION: BEHAVIORAL AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE PERSPECTIVES ON THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Decolonizing public history has become a critical focus for museums, particularly in postcolonial societies like Canada. Traditional exhibitions often marginalize Indigenous perspectives, reinforcing colonial schemas and limiting collective cognitive and emotional engagement. Integrating behavioral and cognitive science into museum design offers the potential to reshape public cognition, empathy, and collective memory, with implications for cultural psychiatry and social well-being. By examining exhibitions as structured cognitive environments, this study situates museums at the intersection of education, psychology, and cultural healing. It emphasizes that decolonization is not solely a curatorial act of inclusion but a process of cognitive restructuring and emotional reconciliation that challenges entrenched historical frameworks. Methods: This study examines the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History (Pointe-à-Callière) as a representative case for decolonizing exhibition strategies. The analysis draws on principles from cognitive psychology, behavioral science and embodied cognition to evaluate exhibition design, visitor flow, multisensory engagement, and narrative integration. Qualitative evidence is synthesized from visitor studies, architectural and curatorial documentation, and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks. Special attention is given to the ways in which spatial sequencing, affective cues, and participatory design act as behavioral interventions that foster empathy, reflection, and schema reconstruction. Results: Findings indicate that strategically sequenced exhibitions, multisensory experiences, and co-curated Indigenous narratives effectively engage visitors’ attention, promote schema reconstruction, and stimulate empathy and moral reasoning. Behavioral interventions—such as spatial hierarchy, lighting, and interactive displays—guide cognitive and emotional processing, while narrative coherence enhances moral reflection. Visitors’ engagement with decolonized narratives produces enhanced memory retention, perspective-taking, and reflective understanding of historical trauma. Moreover, the museum's spatial rhythm and emotional allowing visitors to confront difficult histories in a psychologically contained and meaningful way. The museum thus functions as a cognitive-emotional environment that facilitates both individual and collective reappraisal of historical knowledge. Conclusions: Decolonizing exhibitions that integrate behavioral and cognitive science principles can serve as non-clinical interventions for cultural and collective mental health. By promoting cognitive flexibility, empathy, and reflective engagement, museums become active agents in reshaping public cognition and facilitating collective processing of historical trauma. These findings highlight the potential for museums to contribute to social reconciliation, intergroup understanding, and preventive mental health in postcolonial contexts. The study underscores that museum environments, when informed by behavioral and cognitive insights, can operate as laboratories for empathy and cultural transformation, redefining the museum's role as both an educational and therapeutic public space.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".