Arts experts are commonly skeptical of applying scientific methods to aesthetic experiencing, which remains a field of study predominantly for the humanities. Laboratory research has, however, indicated that artworks may elicit emotional and physiological responses. Yet, this line of aesthetics research has previously suffered from insufficient external validity. We, therefore, conducted a study in which aesthetic perception was monitored in a fine art museum, unrestricting to the viewers' freedom of aesthetic choice. Visitors were invited to wear electronic gloves through which their locomotion, heart rate and skin conductance were continuously recorded. Emotional and aesthetic responses to selected works of an exhibition were assessed using a customized questionnaire. In a sample of 373 adult participants, we found that physiological responses during perception of an artwork were significantly related to aesthetic-emotional experiencing. The dimensions "Aesthetic Quality," "Surprise/Humor," "Dominance," and "Curatorial Quality" were associated with cardiac measures (heart rate variability, heart rate level) and skin conductance variability. This is the first evidence that aesthetics can be statistically grounded in viewers' physiology in an ecologically valid environment-the art galleryenhancing our understanding of the effects of artworks and their curatorial staging.

How do visitors to fine art museums experience exhibitions? Can we classify their experiences? What are the factors that drive different types of visitor experience? We set out to answer these questions by analyzing from sociological, psychological, physiological, and behavioral perspectives the responses of 576 visitors to a special exhibition 11: 1 (+ 3) = Eleven Collections for One Museum mounted at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, from June to August 2009. Our five‐year research project, eMotion: Mapping the Museum Experience, interpreted computer‐modeled movement‐tracking and physiological maps of the visitors in complement with entrance and exit surveys. We tested individual aspects of the visitor, such as her or his expectations of the exhibition prior to seeing it; his or her socio‐demographic characteristics; her or his affinity for art, mood just before and receptivity just after the visit; and spatial, individual, and group‐related behavior patterns. Our study breaks down three types of exhibition experience that we call “the contemplative,” “the enthusing,” and “the social experience.” The results yield new information about aesthetic arousal, cognitive reaction, patterns of social behavior, and the diverse elements of the exhibition experience.

This article reviews empirically oriented studies from the United States and Europe concerning visitor experiences in museum exhibitions in order to pinpoint similarities and differences among them. In the last 20 years, only a few scholars have tackled this research question in multifaceted empirical ways, although some of them have done so extensively. By comparing theoretical and methodical issues, as well as important results, we are able to outline several analytical building blocks that compose a complex framework of visitor expectations, experiences, and outcomes. Gathering credible data on experiences of visitors in exhibitions or museums, a method dating back to the tracking records of Robinson (1928), is an ongoing challenge for the empirically inclined science of museum studies. Social scientists at universities and museums have been asking for 20 years: What are the findings regarding factors, structures, and consequences of exhibition experiences? Where are the blind spots? Which questions should be researched?

In a five-year long research project "eMotion-mapping museum experience," we assessed which effects artworks had on museum visitors and their behavior in the field. We tested several hypotheses such as: Does a famous work attract more attention than a less renowned one, and a "loud" artwork more than a subtle one? Do similar artworks generate similar visitor reactions? Does an artwork lose its attraction if manipulated? To investigate these questions, experiments were conducted using special technology that allowed tracking of visitors' physical locomotion and continuous measurement of physiological markers in the gallery. We also recorded visitors' general subjective assessments of their museum experience, and with respect to specific artworks. Using this innovative approach, we were able to demonstrate strong correlations between artworks, the physical reactions of the visitors, their spatial behavior, and aesthetic ratings.

While there is an increasing shift in cognitive science to study perception of naturalistic stimuli, this study extends this goal to naturalistic contexts by assessing physiological synchrony across audience members in a concert setting. Cardiorespiratory, skin conductance, and facial muscle responses were measured from participants attending live string quintet performances of full-length works from Viennese Classical, Contemporary, and Romantic styles. The concert was repeated on three consecutive days with different audiences. Using inter-subject correlation (ISC) to identify reliable responses to music, we found that highly correlated responses depicted typical signatures of physiological arousal. By relating physiological ISC to quantitative values of music features, logistic regressions revealed that high physiological synchrony was consistently predicted by faster tempi (which had higher ratings of arousing emotions and engagement), but only in Classical and Romantic styles (rated as familiar) and not the Contemporary style (rated as unfamiliar). Additionally, highly synchronised responses across all three concert audiences occurred during important structural moments in the music—identified using music theoretical analysis—namely at transitional passages, boundaries, and phrase repetitions. Overall, our results show that specific music features induce similar physiological responses across audience members in a concert context, which are linked to arousal, engagement, and familiarity.