network of knowledge in the person’s brain to become
his/her knowledge.
1.2 Comprehending Objects at Museum
with Seeing and Hearing
Comprehending objects displayed at museum is anal-
ogous to comprehending texts on a book. According
to the construction-integration theory of text compre-
hension (Kintsch, 1988; Kintsch, 1998), the cogni-
tive processes for comprehension involve two stages:
1) activation of knowledge to construct a knowledge
network that is associated with the representations re-
sulted from perception of the object a person is look-
ing at, which is an automatic activation process of rel-
evant knowledge stored in his/her long-term memory
for the perceived object, followed by 2) a network
integration process to obtain a coherent meaning of
the perceived object that is consistent with the current
context, which could be an automatic unconscious
process or a deliberate conscious process depending
on the level of difficulty involved in the comprehen-
sion process.
In some cases it is not necessary to activate ad-
ditional knowledge for gaining the feeling of com-
prehension if the object is familiar to him/her. In
other cases, however, it requires more cognitive steps
to fully comprehend the object by overpassing infer-
ences because the object is too difficult to gain an im-
mediate understanding. This paper deals with the lat-
ter case, and seeks a way to alleviate this difficulty by
timely providing audio guide, which should interfere
at the minimum with the visual modality of a museum
novice which is used by him/her heavily for observing
the object. The content of audio guide should acti-
vate necessary knowledge to comprehend the object
through another modality than visual. If the infor-
mation provided by audio should activate the part of
knowledge that is missing in the knowledge activated
by the visual information, the person is likely to reach
better comprehension state, that is not being able to
achieve otherwise.
1.3 Measuring Conscious/Unconscious
Processes in Comprehension
The processes of comprehending an object start with
the processes of observation, which could be con-
trolled either consciously or unconsciously, in other
words, they could be deliberate or automatic. It is
known that the processes controlling human activities
are dual, known as the dual-processing theory (Kah-
neman, 2003; Evans, 2003; Evans and Frankish,
2009; Evans, 2010). In addition, the working of long-
term memory should be regarded as autonomous,
which means that the memory reacts to the represen-
tation of perception automatically and it does not be-
have as a passive data-store, similar to a database sys-
tem that stores a huge amount of digital data (Kitajima
and Toyota, 2013; Kitajima, 2016).
Visual information processing starts with feeding
visual stimuli to the brain, followed by either un-
conscious or conscious information processing for
comprehending objects. Gaze points of a person
should indicate the visual information of the object
that might be used for further unconscious or con-
scious processing with automatic knowledge activa-
tion in long-term memory, that should contribute to
reaching comprehension of the object. Note that the
memory activation process is autonomous, not con-
trolled top-down by higher cognitive processes that
issue the command of retrieval of necessary portion
of knowledge.
The locations where the visitors are looking at,
i.e., the gaze points, are measured by using the eye-
tracking technology. If the network of knowledge is
activated sufficiently, he/she would gain the feeling
of satisfaction, or contentment, which is measured by
questionnaire or interview. This paper addresses the
possibility of facilitating knowledge activation via the
audio modality by providing audio guide, which is
subsidiary to the visual modality in appreciating ob-
jects at museum.
1.4 Purpose and Outline of the Paper
For the purpose of enhancing self-paced learning, this
paper studies the effect of audio guide on the levels
of contentment of museum novices by analyzing the
patterns of eye movements while appreciating objects
with or without audio guide. This paper starts with a
section describing a model of contentment in museum
experience and explaining visual information acquisi-
tion in museum experience. Then, the following sec-
tion describes an eye tracking experiment conducted
with nineteen museum-novice participants, who were
asked to appreciate a variety of paintings with or with-
out audio guide. Finally, the last section is presented
for describing the results of experiment and discus-
sion concentrating on the possibility of enhancement
of self-paced learning at museum for museum novices
with timely provision of audio guide.
2 MUSEUM EXPERIENCE
People visit museum to study objects they are interest-
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