Presentation description

With climate change being declared a global crisis, awareness of its negative effects is increasingly critical. Public awareness of the effects of climate change is a crucial step towards implementing solutions for the climate crisis, and museum exhibits provide an effective means of distributing this climate change knowledge to the public. Therefore, maximizing visitor engagement with presented information is essential for spreading updates on climate change. This study focused on social connection as a factor that can influence visual engagement in a museum exhibit environment. The potential link between social connection and visual engagement was tested by examining adult visitors to a climate change exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah. In total, there were 50 groups of between two and five visitors who came with each other to the museum. One visitor in each group wore a mobile eye tracker as they explored the exhibit. Visual engagement was measured by the total time spent fixated on relevant areas of the climate exhibit. After completing the exhibit, visitors answered self-report questions about the quality of their social connection with their group members. The self-reported social connection was rated as very good by most participants and showed little variability. Non-significant associations between social connection and visual attention were found, and low variability may have impacted these results. However, the social connection type showed an interesting pattern with the presence or absence of romantic partners predicting visual attention. Follow-up analyses revealed that visitors with a romantic partner present paid less attention to climate change-relevant information overall, and specifically to the positive areas of the climate change exhibit. These findings suggest that visiting the exhibit with a romantic partner present may be more detrimental to visually engaging with the climate change exhibit than other connection types. Further work is needed to explore the underlying mechanism that may lead to differences across connection types.