How words can guide our eyes

Abstract Pursuing cognitively stimulating activities, such as engaging with art, is crucial to a healthy lifestyle. The current work simulates visits to an art museum in a laboratory setting. Using eye tracking, we explored how linguistically guided visual search may increase attention, enjoyment and retention of information when viewing art. Two groups of adults, young (under 35 years) and older (over 65 years) viewed ten paintings on a computer screen presented either with or without an accompanying audio-guide, while having their eye movements recorded. Audio-guides referred to specific areas of the painting, marked as Interest Areas (IA). Across age groups, as attested by gaze fixations, the audio-guides increased attention to these areas compared to free-viewing. Audio-guided viewing did not lead to a significantly increase over free-viewing in information recall accuracy or feelings of enjoyment and engagement. Overall, older adults did report feeling more positively about both audio-guided and free viewing than young adults. Thus, the use of audio-guides, specifically the gamification through linguistically guided visual search, may be a useful tool to promote meaningful attentional interactions with art.