Museum fatigue

[2][3][4] The first known description of museum fatigue was made by Benjamin Ives Gilman in the January 1916 edition of The Scientific Monthly.

[6] In a 2009 issue of Visitor Studies, Bitgood wrote that possible explanatory concepts for museum fatigue include exhaustion, satiation from repeated exposure to similar exhibits, stress, information overload, object competition from the simultaneous presentation of multiple stimuli, limited attention capacity, and the decision-making process.

Physical fatigue is caused by walking for extended periods of time or attempting to view poorly placed exhibits or labels.

However, the importance of both types of exhaustion in the concept of museum fatigue has been questioned due to the observance of this phenomenon even during shorter visits.

These include not reading long texts, keeping to a designated path, taking breaks and exiting the museum before they become exhausted.

[11] Due to the distinction between concurrent and serial viewing, object competition is clearly separate from museum fatigue.

The attention capacity is also prone to decreases from other sources, such as distractions by loud noises or flashing lights or conversation with other members of the visitor's group.

The Physical Context captures the architecture of the building, the objects inside, the design of the exhibition and other sensory inputs.

Additionally, social factors such as interactions with other visitors and the group with which the student visited the museum also influenced learning.

Design them into the exhibition floor plan, and commit to keeping them there, even when the desire to add more artifacts or content puts them on the chopping block.

[5] Variation in the type of objects exhibited and incorporation of interactive experiences have been shown to mitigate the effects of satiation on visitors.

[6][11] A clear arrangement of exhibits which conduces sequential rather than parallel searching in visitors also aids in relieving the unnecessary cognitive demands placed on them.

[2] With the onset of modern technologies novel ways of studying visitor behavior, such as through phone data or automatic tracking systems, are emerging which could bring us closer to understanding this complex phenomenon.