CHAPTER 6

Memories

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage.

Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours, or days. Others again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Can we explain these differences?

—William James, 1890¹

Frank is an African American in his early 40s. He is college-educated and works as a traffic department scheduler for a large entertainment company in Los Angeles. My colleague Martin Storksdieck and I interviewed Frank in his Anaheim office two years after we first talked with him and observed his visit to the World of Life exhibition at the California Science Center. While at the Science Center, Frank spent all his time with his then nine-year-old daughter, allowing her to almost totally dictate the course of the visit. The following are extended excerpts from our follow-up interview.

Q:	What did you see or do [at the Science Center] that was memorable?
A:	Nothing that stands out. On that particular day, I was more of a follower [laughs], watching my daughter going from exhibit to exhibit. That was her goal, to get all of her stamps. [NOTE: There was a “passport” activity provided by the Science Center designed to encourage children to visit exhibits throughout the museum.] I tried to get her to slow it down a little bit to learn about all of the different things that were going on in the exhibit at that particular time. That was a little difficult, she was just happy to be somewhere. We concentrated on food groups for humans, because to me that’s important —making sure she understands a balanced meal and things of that nature. My daughter was also fascinated by Tess. [Tess is described in the previous chapter.]
Q:	So, you saw the show?
A:	Yes, but mostly I was just trying to keep up with my daughter.
Q:	Do you remember anything about the show?
A:	I remember what my daughter’s reaction was. She was fascinated with seeing something this large and understanding something about the heartbeat. I think she [a featured girl in the show’s movie] was playing soccer.
Q:	Did you learn anything from the show?
A:	I’m not sure. I was really focused on watching my daughter.
Q:	Whose idea was it to go to the Science Center?
A:	It was my idea for a family outing. We became members that same day. I’ve taken my niece and nephew once who are 17 and 14, and they’ve gone with my daughter on their own.
Q:	You said you were a follower that day. What was the purpose of that visit when you were a follower?
A:	Having an activity for my daughter to do for a day. My wife had the day off. It’s possible that it was a weekday and we both had the day off and we wanted to do something interesting and the museum was one of the first choices.
Q:	Do you take your daughter other places to do something interesting?
A:	No, she’s so involved on the weekends with ice skating, ballet for a while, now volleyball, and in a dance class. She’s pretty active on the weekends so we don’t have as much time to visit other places.
[Later in the interview]
Q:	Can you give me some examples of what you or your daughter saw?
A:	We saw the Human Miracle and the baby chicks. The first was where the fetuses are. We went in and talked about it. It was fascinating for her and to see the process of being small and growing. She got a kick out of the baby chicks. That part of the exhibition is always fascinating to her even when we’ve gone back again, she’ll stop and look at that exhibit. She loves to see the eggs, some of which are whole, some of which are empty and some of which are in the process of having a chick emerge from them. It makes the process so real.
Q:	Is it fascinating for you, too?
A:	It’s always fascinating, the process of life, even though we’ve seen it over and over again. I’ve seen it at the old Science Center, since I was almost her age. Actually, when we were having breakfast one day and opened up an egg and she saw red specks and she asked questions about that, I used the exhibit as a teaching tool. I said that’s where chickens come from, remember the Science Center.
Q:	So, did you pick up anything? Were there any things that you remembered since your visit?
A:	Reproduction, nutrition.
Q:	These were things that came up later on?
A:	No, not exactly, [there was no] correlation between them. I just thought about them, nothing specific.
Q:	What about them? When, while you were watching a TV show or reading something?
A:	If anyone would say anything plant life-related or about cells, I’d say, “I saw that at the California Science Center.” Clearly, that stuff made an impression on me.
Q:	So, did you have a good time?
A:	Yes.
Q:	How do you know?
A:	I bought a membership! [laughs] It wasn’t just for the discount in the store! It is a valuable experience to go to the Science Museum at least every 6 months, if not more. If [my daughter] didn’t have so many other things going on, I’d probably keep better track of what’s going on at the Museum, like seminars, things for kids.
Q:	How important is it for you to have a good time? What does that mean to you?
A:	I always enjoy going to museums.
Q:	For yourself?
A:	Yes. I’ll go to the LA County Museum of Art just to walk around if I have some time. I used to walk around the Tar Pits, too. I enjoy it.
Q:	By yourself?
A:	Yes.
Q:	When do you do that?
A:	Rarely, now that I work so much. Sometimes on the weekends I’m here. But if I have a day off, I’ll go there and walk around and I’ll see the same exhibits over and over. I just enjoy it.
Q:	Did your wife have a good time?
A:	I believe she did. [laughs] I think it was just an opportunity for us all to go somewhere together.
Q:	How important is it that she had a good time when the three of you go to a museum?
A:	It’s very important. I hope she’s having a good time. Our viewpoints are definitely different in what we concentrate on at the Museum. I look more at the biological makeup of things and she would just say “Okay, there’s an ant” and move on. But my Dad was a chemistry professor and he helped develop us; develop a liking for science as we were growing up.
Q:	You say “us”?
A:	Yes, my brothers and sisters.
Q:	Did he take you to museums?
A:	Dad was always working so Mom took us.
[Later in the interview]
Q:	But this particular Science Center visit was not for you. It was for your daughter.
A:	Yes. Definitely for her…. As long as she’s having a good time, I’m happy. When we go to the movies, she’ll take her girlfriend and I take that time to go to sleep. [laughs] As long as she’s happy, I’m happy.
Q:	Do you ever take her to places that you want to go, or where it’s for you?
A:	No.
Q:	What would you characterize as the single most satisfying characteristic of that visit?
A:	That I did something good for my daughter, because she enjoyed it and she took some things with her. If I went by myself, I’d look for a higher level of understanding, but that was not the purpose of this visit…. Being exposed to different elements at the museum was a major plus [for my daughter]. It’s important to get kids interested [so they can] pursue that which they find interesting.

Over the course of the interview, Frank kept reinforcing that this visit was not for him, despite the fact that when pressed, he admits that he too might have picked up a few ideas about science. Frank describes an almost totally child-focused experience where he sublimates his needs and interests to those of his daughter. Where he does intervene, it’s on the behalf of his daughter. His interest in learning, independent of his daughter, was limited. In this regard, Frank is typical of people who visit museums with the suite of visitor motivations I’ve called Facilitators; they use museums to satisfy a social visit agenda.

Frank was able to share many details with us about what he did and saw during his museum visit, but since the focus of the visit was his daughter, what he remembered best was what his daughter saw and did. In fact, our interview with him two years after his visit lasted twice as long as the time he actually spent in the exhibition with his daughter and was roughly comparable to the total time he spent at the Science Center. How odd! Why, as the William James quote at the beginning of this chapter suggests, would Frank have such strong and indestructible memories of this museum visit, and why these particular memories?

MUSEUM MEMORIES

One of the more striking things I have discovered in more than thirty years of research on museum visitors is how persistent are memories of the museum visitor experience. Beyond all reason, people remember their visits to museums. In study after study, people have been able, and willing to talk to me about their museum visit experiences days, weeks, months, and even years later, often in amazing detail. Why should these experiences be so memorable? In the late 1990s, Lynn Dierking and I did a study of school-children’s memories of their school field trips. We interviewed eight year olds about trips they had taken one to two years earlier, thirteen year olds about trips they had taken six to seven years earlier, and young adults about trips they had taken anywhere from twelve to twenty years earlier. Amazingly, nearly 100% of the individuals we talked to were able to remember these trips and describe details from their experience. Even more amazing was the fact that there was no significant difference in the strength or depth of memories across these three groups.² In other words, once laid down, museum visitor experiences appear to be strongly held in memory.

In a recent review of the literature on the long-term impact of museum experiences, museum researchers David Anderson, Martin Storksdieck, and Michael Spock similarly emphasized how prevalent it was to find evidence of long-term museum memories. They also made clear that like all memories, museum memories are not a video recording of events. Not all experiences are equally remembered; visitors have been found to be quite selective in what they recall.³ As we saw above, Frank was very focused on his daughter and thus, the majority of his museum memories were about his daughter rather than the actual contents of the museum. And even those things that Frank “chose” to remember likely changed over time. Some aspects grew stronger in his mind as they were reinforced and consolidated by additional experiences and some memories faded away. Some memories no doubt were embellished and distorted to include some information that “factually” didn’t really belong to the visit experience.

This reality was documented by psychologists Maria Medved and Phillip Oatley in a systematic study of museum impact conducted at a Canadian science center.⁴ Medved and Oatley studied visitors to the Science Arcade section of the Ontario Science Center, a gallery which contains interactive displays that focus on physical science concepts such as electricity, air pressure, and sound waves. Visitors were interviewed as they left the Science Arcade and by telephone a month later. Overall, there were no significant differences between the amount and type of exhibition-related conceptual understandings recorded immediately after the visit and one month later. The results were presented to a panel of independent raters, blind to whether an explanation was from the initial or follow-up interview. The panel was asked to categorize the conceptual change statements as either “deterioration of conceptual understanding,” “no change,” or “improved understanding.” Results of this analysis revealed that 36% of the responses showed deterioration of conceptual change over the one-month period, 36% showed an increase in understanding over the one-month period, and 28% remained the same. In other words, conceptual understanding was just as likely to improve over time as it was to deteriorate.

In a study conducted by me and other colleagues in Australia, visitors to science-related museums were tested for their memories of the experience immediately following the visit and again several months later. Like in the study above, we were interested to know how stable museum memories were. Our findings revealed that memories remained quite constant for about 25% of visitors, but for the vast majority of visitors, their memories changed over time. In general, what visitors said the impact of their museum experience was as they exited the museum was significantly different from what they believed the impact was four to eight months later. Over time, specific memories tended to disappear and be replaced by more conceptual and “big picture” memories of the experience.⁵ This is not surprising, particularly in light of a growing body of research that shows that all memories take time to consolidate and become permanent—in some cases, it takes days and even months for memories to be made “permanent.”⁶

Historically, it was assumed that the main thing that contributed to the consolidation of a memory and thus, its persistence over time was rehearsal; ideas are made stronger through continued conversation or thinking. This is a holdover from behaviorist models of learning, stimulus-response-reinforcement, but these days cognitive and neural scientists have come to appreciate that memory is not that simple, nor predictable.⁷ A range of factors other than rehearsal likely contribute to making museum memories “stick.” Some factors, similar to what was discussed in the previous chapter, represent random events. For example, memory would be encouraged in the situation where the visitor turns on the evening news to see a breaking story that happens to directly relate to what he or she saw or did at the museum the previous day. More typically, a series of less random, but no less unique, events that are collectively assembled by the visitor and result in long-term memories are what support the consolidation of museum visitor experience memories. I use the word “assembled” advisedly since memories, like learning, are constructed realities.

Research in the neurosciences confirms the fundamentally constructive nature of memory. Quite literally, memories are built up and combined as they are created, and over time are reconstructed and recombined.⁸ The result is that numerous comparable experiences are combined into a single composite recollection, creating memories that are personal “constructs” of events rather than exact “reproductions.”⁹ Consequently, the ways in which we develop meaning and build memories is an extraordinarily flexible process. Ideas, images, and even events can be assembled into new and unique configurations. Although the impermanence of memory can sometimes be a liability when trying to remember the name of an acquaintance at a party, it can also be a benefit. The constructive quality of memory enables humans to invent, theorize, and create, and that is exactly what visitors do with regard to their museum experience memories. It appears that the memories people construct about their museum visit, though at some level unique and individualized, seem to share some surprising structural commonalities. It is as if we have stumbled upon some magical housing “subdivision” of museum visitor experience memories. As we travel through this subdivision and view memory after memory, we see that the colors and trim on each are unique, but if we look closely, we can discern that structurally each is built from just a handful of basic designs. Just as the individual’s museum visit appears to be shaped by his or her entering identity-related visit motivations so, too, do the individual’s long-term memories and meaning making.

IDENTITY-RELATED MOTIVATIONS AS EXPERIENTIAL FILTER

In order to understand how the long-term meanings people make from their museum visit experience can be shaped by an entering identity-related visit motivation we need to begin with a statement of the obvious—memory is always selective. Only a small subset of the things experienced during a visit will be remembered and many, if not most, things will be forgotten. This is obvious, but the question is can we predict which things visitors will selectively remember, and why these things and not others? The key to understanding what is remembered depends upon understanding the highly personalized “experiential filters” every visitor brings with them to museums. These filters create the lens through which memory is formed and recalled.

At the simplest level, visitors only can and do remember things they experience. The memories an individual ends up with must, by necessity, be drawn from the possible wealth of experiences a museum visitor has choosen in the museum. But as stated above, only a small subset of all the things we can and actually do see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and think about at any given moment are encoded into memory. This makes sense since we are constantly bombarded by stimuli; no one could possibly accommodate it all. All of us use filters to determine not only what to attend to, but also what we store in our memory.

In recent years, we have come to equate that which is attended to and remembered with the idea of meaningfulness. By definition, we attend to that we find meaningful and ignore that which we find meaningless. But what is meaning? According to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, meaning is our mind’s way of making sense of the world; the translation of existence into conceptual form.¹⁰ Meaning provides a framework for helping us assess what is important and supports our understanding and actions. Humans, in particular, are extremely adept at meaning making—it is arguably one of the things that sets us apart from other life forms. As the pace of cultural evolution has increased, so too have selection pressures for individuals capable of sifting and sorting through greater quantities of information to determine that which is most meaningful. Modern humans are truly experts at making meaning.

Visitors to museums make meaning. Each and every visitor brings to bear their prior knowledge, experience, interests, and values in order to actively, though not necessarily consciously, determine which parts of the museum are worth focusing on. Museum visitors only attend to those aspects of their visitor experience that at the moment are most meaningful to them. Let me make this point very clear. As we suggested in the previous chapter, the realities of the museum—for example, the content and design of exhibitions and labels—are important. But exactly which elements of a museum visit experience a visitor will actually attend to is only somewhat predictable based upon the contents of the museum. On any given day, two visitors will walk through the exact same space, at the exact same time, and come away having seen and thought about entirely different things. And for each of these two visitors, reality is what they paid attention to, not what was there. The museum visitor experience is always a personally-constructed reality; it is not tied to any fixed entity, space, or event. Not only can two visitors have a different visitor experience standing in front of the same exhibit, but the same individual on two different days will almost certainly have a different visitor experience because he or she is not the same person those two days.

So who was Frank, the subject of our chapter interview, on the day of his visit? As I mentioned previously, Frank was enacting a Facilitator role on that day; the reality of the California Science Center that Frank experienced was filtered through the lens of how he perceived his daughter’s interests and activities, not his own.

Q:	Do you remember anything about the [Tess] show?
A:	I remember what my daughter’s reaction was. She was fascinated with seeing something this large and understanding something about the heartbeat. I think she [a featured girl in the show’s movie] was playing soccer.
Q:	Did you learn anything from the show?
A:	I’m not sure. I was really focused on watching my daughter.

Although meaning-making has become highly evolved in modern humans, it is a process that has its roots deep in our evolutionary history. Meaning-making evolved long before there was language, in fact, before there were humans, primates, or other mammals at all. No matter how eloquent the theory of meaning-making or poetic the description, ultimately it is a process/product of a complex series of electro-chemical interactions in the brain and body that have evolved over many hundreds of millions of years. (For reference, human-like creatures have been on this planet for less than 10 million years and modern humans for much less than a hundred thousand years.¹¹) The process of making meaning, even as practiced by twenty-first century humans, is constructed upon a very ancient, whole body, biological base. It is profoundly important to appreciate the long evolutionary history of meaning-making; it is not just a recent cultural overlay unique to modern humans.

Meaning, and for that matter, memories, are never constructed de novo; visitor meaning is always constructed from a foundation of fundamental personal needs, prior experiences, and interests. Over the past decades, hundreds of people have shared their museum memories with me and my colleagues, and in virtually all cases these individuals’ entering needs, experiences, and interests have figured prominently in their recollections. Their entering “frames” helped shape both the broad narrative of their recollections as well as the specifics of their narratives.

With Frank’s memories as an example, he kept reinforcing that this visit was not for him in the interview, despite the fact that when pressed, he admitted that he too might have picked up some information from the exhibits. Frank talked about growing up in a family that valued learning and intimated that he’s trying to be more involved with his daughter’s upbringing than his father was with his upbringing. Still, he’s obviously proud of his father; the fact that Frank’s father instilled a love of science in him and his siblings is clearly important to him. Going to museums thus emerged as something deeply rooted in his sense of self. Frank explained to us that there was little time for additional experiences in his daughter’s busy life and in his life, as well. Choices had to be made, and the choice to specifically visit a science education venue might have had much to do with Frank’s own family history. Visiting the Science Center appeared to satisfy several of his important identity-related needs, all of which were bound up with Frank’s multi-dimensional concept of what being a “good father” meant to him. Unlike his own father, taking his daughter to the Science Center meant not being so preoccupied with his work that he neglected doing enjoyable things with his daughter. It also meant that, like his father, he was providing a positive role-model, in particular valuing science and learning. We can infer that this was a major motivation behind Frank’s purchase of a Science Center membership, which as he quickly pointed out, was not in order to save money at the gift shop, or on future admissions since admission to the Science Center is free. It was clear that this visit to the Science Center was extremely important to Frank for a lot of reasons, many of which represented deeply-felt needs; it was also clear that Frank felt a great sense of personal satisfaction about his visit. As I will discuss more fully, this visit resulted in changes to Frank’s own sense of self, particularly his sense of being a good father and uncle, as well as an enhanced perception of the benefits a setting like the California Science Center afforded. And unlike Felipe, who we discussed in the previous chapter, Frank’s opinion of the Science Center as a valuable educational institution was positively reinforced.

These deeply held identity-related needs and visit motivations—Frank’s desire to be a good father and support his daughter’s science learning—form a large-scale prism through which virtually the entire visit experience is viewed. For Frank, his visit to the Science Center was remembered through the Facilitator self-aspect lens of “good father”—every memory began and/or ended with this perspective. This self-aspect helped to create the main architecture of Frank’s memories. However, the details were framed by the specifics and realities of his experiences, only some of which involved the actual visit itself.

For example, when Frank talked about seeing the chicks in the exhibition his memories were a mixture of his prior museum experiences, his actual visit on that day, and his subsequent experiences with his daughter:

It’s always fascinating, the process of life, even though we’ve seen it over and over again. I’ve seen it at the old Science Center, since I was almost her age. Actually, when we were having breakfast one day and opened up an egg and she saw red specks and she asked questions about that, I used the exhibit as a teaching tool. I said that’s where chickens come from, remember the Science Center.

As we can see, prior experiences and interests, through the lens of identity-related motivations, frame what is attended to and what is remembered. Consistent with brain research, psychological studies have found that prior knowledge and experience directly influences how people perceive an event or what part of a situation is attended to in the first place.¹² People pay attention to and remember only what they are predisposed to attend to and remember; people predisposed to an action are most likely to perform that action.

This is why an understanding of the entering identity-related motivations of visitors represents such an important predictor of what people will attend to and remember. The power of the relationship between intention and action has long been understood. Nearly a half century ago, psychologist Victor Vroom formulated a model of action which he called expectancy theory. Expectancy theory states that an individual will act in a certain way based on the expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and on the attractiveness of that outcome to the individual.¹³ Vroom’s motivational model was later modified and elaborated on by several people,¹⁴ but the basics of the model remain—what a person expects to find in an environment also affects how an individual responds to it.¹⁵ Recent leisure and tourism research now indicates that not only do these expectations strongly influence what experiences an individual will have, but they also represent, as seemingly occurred with Frank, the best predictors of experience satisfaction and memory.¹⁶

Further evidence of just how powerful this relationship is between expectations, behaviors, and satisfaction comes from an unlikely place—medical research on drugs. A common phenomenon among medical researchers is what is known as the “placebo effect.”¹⁷ A placebo is usually a “control” used by researchers to mimic the “intervention” but is designed to be something that actually has no “real” value. For example, an experimental drug might be injected or given as a pill to a group of patients while another group of patients is given a placebo of a sugar water injection or a similar-sized and -colored sugar pill. If the treatment group has any positive or negative effects relative to the control group, those effects can be assumed to be caused by the “real” drug rather than just the process of receiving medical intervention. The reason scientists feel the need to invest so much energy in this charade is that in most studies of this sort, a large number of people have positive effects just by being part of the study. It is not uncommon for as many as half of all participants receiving the placebo treatment to show the same improvements as those being treated with the actual medicine.¹⁸ The expectation of receiving benefit seems sufficient enough to cause benefit.

Evidence for the benefits engendered by placebo effects go beyond just self-reports and can include actual changes in patients’ physiological condition. For example, in one set of studies involving antidepressant medications, brain scans of patients who were benefited by the medication showed significant changes in a particular area of the brain. Approximately half of all patients receiving placebo medications also showed changes in activity in these exact same areas of the brain.¹⁹ Further, there is additional evidence that the placebo effect is not just a “psychological” phenomenon, as it has been shown to occur in experiments with laboratory animals like rats. In other words, the placebo effect appears to have some basis in neurochemistry, not just in conscious expectation. The implications of this phenomenon should be clear—whether people remember their museum visit experiences because their entering identity-related expectations actually shaped their visit or because they perceived that it shaped their experiences is immaterial. What is important is that the expectations created by a visitor’s entering identity-related motivations represent powerful shapers of memory construction. Thus even though our harried Facilitator Hanna’s actual museum experience sounds as if it were hellish, her memories of the experience are much more benign.

Returning to our example in this chapter, Frank believed that going to the Science Center would be an opportunity for him to enact his role as a “good father”—a father who cares about his daughter and wants to ensure she has quality learning opportunities. During the visit we actually observed Frank trying to enact this fatherly role. We observed him staying with his daughter, even though she was running all over the museum. Importantly, we also observed him trying to talk with his daughter about what she was seeing and trying to help her think about the meaning of some of these exhibits. Two years later, not only were his memories of the experience quite positive, they also tended to follow this same basic narrative. He talked about trying to slow down his daughter so that she’d be able to understand important things. He specifically remembered attempting to focus her attention on certain subjects and specific exhibits, “We concentrated on food groups for humans, because to me that’s important—making sure she understands a balanced meal and things of that nature.” Frank’s expectations for his visit helped to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. He came to accomplish something, he used the museum to accomplish that goal, and his memories of the experience were built around the accomplishment of his initial goals. All of which led him to conclude that the visit was a great success. The success of this initial visit prompted him to repeat the experience of visiting the Science Center with his daughter; we can assume that his perceptions of the “correctness” of his initial expectations have now been reinforced by subsequent visits.

Whereas Frank’s entering identity-related motivations helped to create the basic architecture of his memories, several other important factors also directly contributed to the specific details of his memories. These three factors were choice and control, emotion, and context and appropriate challenge. Not only do these three groups of factors contribute to the details of memory, they are also the factors which I believe are instrumental in making museum memories so enduring.

CHOICE AND CONTROL

Museum experiences are wonderful examples of free-choice learning; I have come to believe that it is because they are so quintessentially free-choice that they are so memorable. Humans, and quite likely other organisms as well, actively seek to have control over events in their lives. This, according to leisure expert John Kelly, is why people so highly value leisure time—it’s often the only time in our lives where we can exercise considerable choice and control over what we do.²⁰ It is also why learning experiences that incorporate choice and control are among the most powerful and memorable. Museums are settings in which visitors have the opportunity to exercise considerable choice over what things to look at, and what ideas to think about it. Or framed in another way, visitors have the opportunity to control their own meaning-making. Choice and control are fundamental, but understudied variables in both the wider world of memory and learning as well as the world of museums. A whole range of important variables play a role in visitor choice and control including interest, motivation, self-concept, attribution, and locus of control. Most of the research on these variables has been conducted in laboratory or school settings—situations in which individual meaning-making is severely constrained and goals are externally imposed. So, perhaps not surprisingly, most traditional studies of memory have discovered that forgetting, rather than remembering, is the norm.²¹ One could hypothesize that when meaning-making occurs in a free-choice setting like a museum, a setting in which learners have significant choice and control over their decision-making and experiences, they should exhibit greater interest, motivation, self-esteem, attribution, and locus of control. In sum, when all of these things are positive the result should be enhanced memory formation. In the few cases where this has been investigated, this is exactly what has been found.²²

A recent Scientific American article highlighted the importance of both studying more natural experiences and the important role that choice and control play in thinking and remembering. Science writers John Pearson and Michael Platt begin their article by pointing out that although a major insight of recent neuroscience research has been the discovery of key areas of the brain where specific neurological functions like speech, vision, and hearing tend to be localized, less often discussed is the companion notion that the power of the brain, the key to its flexibility and coordination, lies also in the connections between these dedicated processing centers. “For modern neuroscientists, the whole story must lie not just in the brain’s compartmentalization, but in its communication.”²³

Pearson and Platt describe a breakthrough research study that attempted to overcome the challenges of investigating how different parts of the brain communicate. Bijan Pesaran of New York University and collaborators at the California Institute of Technology recently managed to “eavesdrop” on sets of neurons in an experiment designed to catch the cross-talk between two specialized regions of the brain during decision making. The experiment was set up so that monkeys were monitored under two conditions, one where they were given a rote choice of tasks and the second where they got to execute free-choice; both resulted in a reward. The researchers found that when the monkeys were freely searching for a reward, the firings in the two distinct parts of the brain were significantly more coordinated than they were when the monkeys were following the fixed search pattern. The researchers concluded that the two brain regions shared more information under the free-choice than the mandated-order condition. What’s more, analysis of the relative timing of activity in the two areas seemed to suggest that firing in each region was influenced by activity in the other and this resulted in an increase in the overall robustness of the neural network under the free-choice condition. In other words, with choice and control the strength of neural pathways, which is neuroscience talk for “memories,” were enhanced.

One of the few museum-based studies on the importance of choice and control was conducted by museum visitor researcher Deborah Perry as part of her doctoral work at Indiana University. Perry found that the confidence that came along with free-choice learning, coupled with the motivation to control one’s environment, were among the most important variables determining successful learning from a children’s museum exhibit.²⁴ Perry discovered that six motivational variables played major roles in museum learning. Although it was not surprising that factors such as curiosity, challenge, and play had a role in children’s museum learning, the need for children to feel in control and confident about their environment was surprising. Perhaps, one of the reasons so little attention has been focused on choice and control in museum learning is because it is almost too obvious. Since these variables tend to be intrinsic to the museum experience, it is all too easy to overlook how important a contribution they make to most museum-based learning. Investigations by Finnish museum researcher Hannu Salmi confirmed that the motivating effects of freedom and control over the environment can be used by museums to enhance student learning.²⁵ In fact, these motivational attributes of museums have been observed by a wide range of investigators and are frequently used as a justification for why schools should take children on field trips to museums.²⁶

Perhaps the best evidence for how important central choice and control is to the visitor experience comes from the handful of studies that have attempted to understand what happens when free-choice is denied to museum visitors. It turns out there are natural experiments for this—they are called overly-structured school field trips. Comparisons between groups of schoolchildren whose visit experiences were tightly prescribed and groups of schoolchildren who had opportunities to self-direct their experiences have yielded very provocative findings. Australian museum researcher Janette Griffin investigated matched groups of schoolchildren in museums under two conditions. The first condition was an organized, traditional, teacher-directed school field trip, and in the second condition, students were freed from the typical constraints and structures imposed by teachers and allowed to freely define their own learning agenda in the museum. The second condition was not only perceived by the students as more enjoyable, but learning was actually facilitated.²⁷ Interestingly, students in this second situation were observed to behave and learn in ways similar to children in family groups.²⁸ Griffin identified three variables important to students in these learning situations: choice, purpose, and ownership. Given ownership of learning, learning and enjoyment became intertwined, and according to Griffin ultimately, inseparable in the minds of the children.²⁹

So, why was the visit experience of our Facilitator Frank so memorable? I would postulate that it was partly because Frank was the person who picked the Science Center to visit. Although he did not select the pathway through the museum—his daughter did that—he did help to influence that pathway and felt very much involved with the visit. We know from our research data that Frank did not remember all the exhibits he and his daughter stopped at that day; why did he remember some but not others? He remembered the Human Miracle exhibit and the chick exhibit, also the exhibit about food groups. Arguably, all of these were salient for Frank because they were exhibits where he felt he was able to specifically interact with his daughter, and by extension as a Facilitator, exercise some control over the experience. An interesting outlier to this pattern was the Tess exhibit, which is salient in and of itself—90% of all visitors to the Science Center see this show and 90% of those are able to talk about what they’ve learned from it.³⁰ Interestingly, Frank claimed not to remember much about the Tess exhibit, except some specifics directly related to his daughter’s interest.

Finally, it is quite likely that the visit was much more memorable for Frank than it was for his daughter, since the visit was his choice not hers.³¹ Frank chose to be a facilitator of his daughter’s experience and he clearly felt good about having made that decision. The fact that the visit was his decision and he got to actively participate in the experience, as opposed to a movie where he might go with his daughter but fall asleep, almost certainly helped to make it memorable for him. Due to the high degree of choice and control, another important reason contributing to Frank’s strong memories of his visit was the fact that it made him feel good.

EMOTION

The fact that Frank had an emotional involvement with his daughter’s Science Center experience is non-trivial. Emotion is the second important contributor to memorable museum visit experiences. Although Frank was not so moved by his Science Center visit that he broke down and wept when we talked to him, it was clear that Frank’s visit experience and his subsequent memories involved not just descriptions of what he saw and did, but expressions of feelings, attitudes, and beliefs.

One of the most startling findings of the last quarter century of brain research has been the critical role played in all memory by the area known as the limbic system. The limbic system is evolutionarily one of the oldest parts of our brain. Located in the middle of the brain and made up of a number of discrete structures (for example, the amygdala, hippocampus, and thalamus), the limbic system probably first evolved among reptiles, but it is well-developed in all mammals. Appropriate to its ancient lineage, the limbic area was recognized as the major brain center for emotional and geographical memory.³² However, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, the brain is increasingly being appreciated for how highly integrated and interconnected its various structures are.³³ The limbic system structures have been found to be extensively connected in looped circuits to all parts of the brain, as well as to all of the body’s organs and systems, responding to the needs and demands of various body functions and cycles.³⁴ This system not only helps regulate emotions and geography; it has emerged as the focal point for regulating memory.³⁵

Before any perception begins the process of being permanently stored in memory, it must first pass through at least two appraisal stages involving the limbic system.³⁶ All incoming sensory information is given an initial screening for meaningfulness and personal relevance by structures in this system. It is also filtered for its relationship to our internal physical state (for example, “I’m hungry, so I guess I’ll focus on things related to food rather than Shakespeare”). This filtering and interpretation of incoming sensory information is centered in the limbic system but it involves virtually every part of the brain, and the body.³⁷ In essence, this process both determines what is worth attending to and remembering (for example, “Will this be important information in the future? Does it relate to something I already know, feel, or believe?”) and how something is remembered (for example, “That object reminds me of an interesting experience I once had. I saw that beautiful painting at the same time I was having a good time with my spouse.”). In this way, in fractions of a second, our mind separates, sorts, combines, and judges perceptions occurring both inside and outside of us. The key role of the limbic system in this process has made cognitive scientists come to more fully appreciate just how important emotion is in the entire meaning-making process.

Current neuroscience research has shown that learning cannot be separated in the Cartesian sense between rational thought and emotion, nor neatly divided into cognitive (facts and concepts), affective (feelings, attitudes, and emotions), and psychomotor (skills and behaviors) functions as many psychologists and educators have attempted to do for nearly a half century. All meaning-making, even of the most logical topic, involves emotion, just as emotions virtually always involve cognition.³⁸ By virtue of its journey through the limbic system, it seems that every memory comes with an emotional “stamp” attached to it.³⁹ The stronger the emotional “value,” the more likely sensory information is to pass this initial inspection and be admitted into memory; and interestingly, pleasant experiences are strongly favored over unpleasant ones.⁴⁰ Evolution has thus insured a dependency between learning, memory, and survival by making the process of acquiring and storing information both very thorough and, by virtue of its relationship to the limbic system, an intrinsically pleasurable and rewarding experience.⁴¹

Historically, emotions were thought to be a set of stereotyped and automatic expressive behaviors. Now it is understood how nuanced and variable emotions are and that emotions are an integral part of brain functioning. In one of the most widely accepted theories of emotion, psychologist Richard Lazarus explained that

emotion recruits cognitive and affective components in order to assess the import of events in the environment for a person’s key goals, such as a key relationship, survival, identity, or avoiding moral offence. The brain makes an initial judgment of whether the information it has received bodes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for such goals. The characteristic feeling of the particular emotion (fear, love, anger etc.) is then felt at some level of intensity. This is the ‘primary appraisal’ process. It shows that emotion is intrinsically cognitive, although the thinking may be more or less rapid and unconscious.

Beyond the evaluation of the event as good or bad, the person may also cognitively generate a plan (the ‘secondary appraisal’), giving emotion a directive quality; we usually are inclined to act in some way when we have a strong feeling about one of our key goals.⁴²

As the quality of brain research has increased, these ideas have been confirmed and a more elaborated picture of emotion has emerged. As neuroscientist Jonathon Turner explains, “Emotions give each alternative a value and, thereby, provide a yardstick to judge and to select alternatives. This process need not be conscious; and indeed, for all animals including humans, it rarely is…. One can’t sustain cognitions beyond working [i.e., short-term] memory without tagging them with emotion.”⁴³ Thus, we can see that our brains store memories in networks of meaning and that emotions play a big role in whether an event is experienced as meaningful and whether and how it is remembered. If an emotion is engaged, the brain marks the experience as meaningful, and stores memory of it in the networks activated by the emotion and similar experiences. What a person remembers is thus largely determined by previous emotional arousal, and vice versa. Emotionally rich memories are particularly memorable because they involve the limbic system in memory formation; some involvement is a good thing, and a lot of involvement is even better.⁴⁴ The fact that virtually every study ever conducted on museum visitors has found that visitors find the experience highly enjoyable and satisfying should help to explain, at least in part, why museum memories are so long-lasting. Enjoyable experiences are memorable! But visitors typically only remember selected parts of the visitor experience; what makes some parts of an overall enjoyable experience particularly memorable, and not others?

In 2008, one of my graduate students, Katie Gillespie, and I attempted to directly test the assumption that emotion influences visitor learning and memory. We tested these ideas using a new traveling exhibition developed by the California Science Center called Goose Bumps: The Science of Fear. This exhibition was designed to help visitors not only learn about fear, but to experience fear in a safe environment through an interactive fear “Challenge Course.” The challenges allowed visitors to experience several common fears: fear of animals, fear of electric shock, fear of loud noises, and the fear of falling. It was assumed that these challenges would elicit visitors’ emotions, more so than the more traditional Science Center exhibits. This made the exhibit an ideal setting in which to investigate the role of emotion on cognition.

We compared a random sample of visitors who visited this traveling exhibition with a random sample of Science Center visitors who did not see the exhibition.⁴⁵ We measured visitors’ pre- and post-emotions using a technique called Russell’s Grid.⁴⁶ According to Russell’s circumplex model, emotion can be measured along two dimensions: arousal (alertness) and valence (pleasure).⁴⁷ As predicted, Goose Bumps visitors reported significantly higher emotional arousal levels than did the control group of visitors, but there was no significant difference in the emotional valence scores of the two groups of visitors. The interpretation of these results suggests that the “challenges” in the Goose Bumps exhibition had their intended effect of making visitors more aroused/excited, but all visitors to the Science Center found the experience equally pleasurable. Three to four months after their visit, we interviewed members of each group by telephone. As expected, all visitors were able to recall their visit and could describe their experiences and provide examples of what they saw, did, and felt. However, the Goose Bumps visitors had more salient memories of their visit than did visitors from the control group. When asked to describe a Science Center exhibit of their choice, Goose Bumps exhibition visitors provided responses of significantly greater breadth and depth than did control group visitors.⁴⁸ Overall, when asked to describe something they had learned during their initial visit, Goose Bumps exhibition visitors provided significantly higher quality responses than did control group visitors. Goose Bumps exhibition visitors were also significantly more likely than control group visitors to have reflected on their Science Center visit and to have shared their reflections with others. In summary, the Science Center visitor experience was more salient and memorable for Goose Bumps visitors than it was for visitors in the control group. This research provided direct evidence that, as predicted, an emotional experience, in particular an emotionally arousing visitor experience, resulted in strong and lasting memories. In this case, these memories were even above and beyond those created by a normally stimulating and pleasurable Science Center visit.

A careful reading of the interview transcript at the beginning of this chapter reveals that emotion also played a role in Frank’s Science Center visit and likely figured prominently into the particular aspects of the visit that were remembered. For example, “I tried to get her to slow it down a little bit to learn about all of the different things that were going on in the exhibit at that particular time. That was a little difficult, she was just happy to be somewhere.” In another passage, Frank says, “She got a kick out of the baby chicks.” The joy that Frank derived from this visit was clear throughout our interview with him; his daughter’s joy was his joy—“I remember what my daughter’s reaction was. She was fascinated with seeing something this large and understanding something about the heartbeat…. That part of the exhibition is always fascinating to her even when we’ve gone back again, she’ll stop and look at that exhibit.” For Frank, and other visitors, choice and control and emotion appear to be important contributors to memories of the museum visit experience but there needs to be more. After all, on the grand scale of emotionality, museums are unlikely to be a “10.” There are many other life events that are likely to be equally, if not more, emotion-laden. What else is likely important?

CONTEXT AND APPROPRIATE CHALLENGE

The third critical piece of the puzzle is the importance of context and appropriate challenge. The interview with Frank revealed that the World of Life exhibition provided a context for him to help his daughter understand something about human development as well as the development of chickens. Because the experience was so concrete, it allowed Frank to help his daughter make the connections between the eggs at the kitchen table and the birth of chicks in an incubator. It is examples like these that make the museum so memorable; museums provide tangible building blocks for the making of memories. Museums are very contextually relevant and rich places; they are full of real things, situated within relevant contexts. Because of this, museums are places that make it easy to form memories. This contextualization of the world enables visitors to make “real” that which was previously only “sort of real.”

We can better understand how this happens if we know a little more about the process by which memories are formed. Memory-making is always a continuous, constructive process, both literally and figuratively. Although the total picture is yet to be understood, one theory of the brain holds that all of our memories are stored as pieces of images.⁴⁹ Different parts of the brain may actually store different pieces. When we attempt to “remember” something, we literally reassemble the pieces of our memory as best we can into a single whole. We perceive our memories as perceptual wholes even if some of the details are fuzzy or glossed over; this is in spite of the fact that, more often than not, our memories are almost always actually less than “whole cloth.”⁵⁰

Not only does memory retrieval require the reconstruction of bits and pieces of images through mental action, it also requires an appropriate context within which to express itself. In the absence of contextual cues from the outside world, the patterns and associations stored within each person’s brain would remain dormant or have no meaning.⁵¹ As we talked to Frank about his Science Center visit, he constantly framed his recollections within the context of the actual exhibits seen by him and his daughter. For example, “I remember what my daughter’s reaction was. She was fascinated with seeing something this large and understanding something about the heartbeat. I think she [a featured girl in the show’s movie] was playing soccer.” And, “She got a kick out of the baby chicks. That part of the exhibition is always fascinating to her even when we’ve gone back again, she’ll stop and look at that exhibit. She loves to see the eggs, some of which are whole, some of which are empty and some of which are in the process of having a chick emerge from them. It makes the process so real.”

Not only do museums create contextually relevant experiences, they have a knack for creating experiences that are appropriately scaled to visitors’ interests and abilities. As originally investigated and described by psychologist Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, and confirmed by a wide range of other investigators, people appear to exhibit a common set of behaviors and outcomes when engaged in tasks which they find intrinsically rewarding.⁵² Csikzentmihalyi found that chess players, rock climbers, dancers, painters, and musicians all used similar explanations when describing the attraction of the activities they enjoy doing. Csikzentmihalyi called this common experiential quality the flow experience, because it is generally described as a state of mind that is spontaneous, almost automatic, like the flow of a strong current.⁵³ Three general characteristics of activities that produce flow are that they have clear goals, continuous feedback, and the tasks demanded of the participant are in balance with the person’s abilities. In a game of bridge or of chess, one knows every second what one would like to accomplish. Musicians find out immediately if they hit a wrong note; tennis players find out if they hit the ball badly and if they’re competitively matched or over-matched by their opponent. According to Csikzentmihalyi, this constant accountability and feedback is a major reason one gets so completely immersed in a flow activity. If the challenges are greater than the skill levels, anxiety results; if skills are greater than challenges, the result is boredom.⁵⁴ This phenomenon appears to hold across a wide array of skills including physical, mental, artistic, and musical talents. The more one does an activity, the greater one’s skill. The greater one’s skill, the greater the challenges are required in order to continue enjoying the activity and remaining in a state of flow.

Most successful museum exhibitions and programs possess these qualities. They permit the participant to seek the level of engagement and understanding appropriate for the individual, across a broad range of visitor identity-related motivations. By allowing understanding to occur at many different levels and from many different perspectives, good exhibitions and programs simultaneously define the boundaries of experience and allow the visitor to intellectually navigate the experience in a way that makes sense for them. Thus engagement, a flow experience, can result because there is sufficient depth to permit appropriate levels of challenge for a wide range of users.

Apropos to the immediately previous section of this chapter, flow learning experiences are not just mental experiences, they are also emotional experiences. As Csikzentmihalyi states, “when goals are clear, feedback is unambiguous, challenges and skills are well matched, then all of one’s mind and body become completely involved in the activity.”⁵⁵ In this state, the person becomes unaware of fatigue or the passing of time. It is truly an exhilarating experience—physically, emotionally, and cognitively. Accordingly, it is also extremely pleasurable. People who experience something even approaching flow, desire to do it over and over again. At some level, most frequent museum-goers can be characterized as having something akin to a flow experience. If they did not derive deep intrinsic rewards from going to museums, they would not keep going to them again and again. Above all, flow experiences are memorable experiences. Although there’s no way to retroactively test this, it is a fair assumption that the specific experiences Frank found most memorable were the ones that came closest to approximating a flow experience. What was a flow experience for Frank likely to look like? As Frank was seeking to be a supportive parent of an active nine-year-old girl in a science center, the answer would be that he would be feeling flow at those times when he felt that the museum setting afforded him an intellectually and emotionally satisfying connection between himself and his daughter.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING

Thus, we can conclude that the things people see and do in museums are memorable because museums are places that allow people to build tangible memories based on seeing real things in appropriate contexts. The things people see and do in museums are memorable because they occur during emotionally positive and rich times in people’s lives which makes them highly salient and perceived as important. The museum experiences that are most memorable are highly likely to be those that allow visitors to become engaged at intellectually and emotionally appropriate levels. The fact that visitors can exercise considerable choice and control over what they see and do significantly increases the likelihood that a visitor will find exhibitions and programs that are intellectually and emotionally appropriate for them. Collectively, these qualities make visitor experiences extraordinarily memorable. These factors help to explain much of why museum experiences are so memorable; they also begin to help us understand which memories in particular are likely to stick. We can see that the specifics of Frank’s recollections were strongly influenced by his ability to choose and to a degree, control his daughter’s activities. For example, both he and his daughter enjoyed the chick exhibit and he was able to reinforce this experience for his daughter when at home. The fact that design of the exhibit enabled him to use the conceptual ideas behind the exhibit in a way that was appropriate to the needs and interests of his daughter was critical; the very concrete nature of this experience also helped make it memorable. And nothing could have been more concrete and “real” than a 50-foot, animatronic woman with flashing lights! Finally, Frank particularly seemed to remember the times his daughter was excited by the museum and appeared to be really enjoying herself. Also highly salient were the times he perceived that not just his daughter, but the two of them, were enjoying themselves. This emotional component reinforced his overarching “good father” self-aspect and provided a strong memory marker. What held all these factors together for Frank, as they do for nearly all visitors, was his entering identity-related visit motivation.

Frank came away from his visit with a range of specific memories about the California Science Center and his and his daughter’s interactions at that museum. Equally notable, though, was what impact the whole experience seemed to have on him. As we talked with Frank, he was continually laughing and smiling. No doubt he is a happy person, but clearly the recollections of this experience were a source of great joy and satisfaction for him. As mentioned several times, Frank used this experience to strengthen and build his own set of identity-related needs, in particular the desire to be a good father to his daughter. He perceived that not only did the experience support this self-aspect, but by purchasing a membership he could extend this identity-related need beyond fatherhood and his daughter to include “unclehood” and his niece and nephew. He was carrying on his family’s tradition of building respect and appreciation for learning in general and his father’s commitment to science in particular. It was Frank’s way of “passing forward” to the next generation the advantages he perceived that his parents had given him and his siblings when they were growing up. It does not seem like much of a stretch to assert that a major outcome of Frank’s museum visit experience was identity-building.

As pointed out by Jay Rounds, a large part of how we come to understand who we are—our identity—comes through the post hoc process of interpreting what we’ve done. This is a looking-backward process; “We understand backwards by looking at what we did, and considering how we felt about doing it, and asking what sort of person it is who acts and feels that way. We explain ourselves to ourselves, using our actions as evidence. You can’t know who you are until you see what you do.”⁵⁶ Although the California Science Center aspires to “stimulate curiosity and inspire science learning in everyone by creating fun, memorable experiences …”, the primary outcome for Frank of his museum visitor experience did not directly relate to science learning or even curiosity, though certainly something related to science learning and stimulating curiosity were achieved. For Frank, the primary benefit of the experience was his ability to build and strengthen his self-perception of himself as a good father and uncle, and perhaps most importantly, it also allowed himself and others such as his wife, his siblings, and parents (if they are still alive), and as it turned out Martin Storksdieck and me, to see tangible evidence of this identity. Not a bad day’s work, though as also pointed out by Rounds, identity-work is an on-going, never-ending process, not a one-time product.⁵⁷ Frank will need to continue working at this self-aspect of being a good father and uncle. But now, he has added to his mental repertoire that visiting the Science Center is a good way to accomplish this good father/uncle role. We know he’s already acted upon that perception and we can safely assume he’s also told others, friends and family, about this.

In this way, the other outcome of Frank’s museum visit experience is a small, but significant increase in his and the broader community’s sense of how a science center can support a person’s leisure experiences. Frank was happy to share his positive feelings about the Science Center and describe how it was a good place for supporting the kind of facilitating role that he played with his daughter. Every museum visitor does this, to greater or lesser extent, whether their perceptions of the museum were positive as was the case for most of the visitors described in this book, or negative as Felipe felt his were. All visitors come away from their museum visit experience with a better understanding of what these institutions called museums afford. Predictably, the perceptions a person has about a museum he or she has visited are framed by the lens of their entering identity-related visit motivations. For Frank, visiting the California Science Center as a Facilitator reinforced for him that science centers are great places to take children. While for Frances, visiting the Berkeley Botanical Gardens as a Recharger reinforced for her that botanical gardens are great places to find peace and tranquility and a release from the stresses of everyday life. As we learned from Frank’s interview, he clearly has knowledge of other museums as well, for example the Los Angeles Museum of Art and the La Brea Tar Pits; he has a sense of what these places might afford as well. However, since these are places he described visiting by himself and thus, were almost certainly satisfying different types of identity-related needs than those enacted at the California Science Center, we can predict that Frank’s perceptions of what these museums afford is quite different than his perceptions of what the Science Center affords. What the museum visitor experience model predicts are different entering motivations result in different exiting understandings.

What the museum visitor experience model also predicts is that through the process of Frank sharing his experiences and perceptions of his Science Center visit with others, he is, in a small way helping to shape the larger community’s perceptions of the Science Center in particular, and museums in general. Museums invest considerable resources in communicating to the world who they are and what they do (e.g., brochures, banners, media placements), but most of the publics’ knowledge and perceptions derive from word-of-mouth descriptions and recommendations by former visitors. Individually these conversations between friends and family have a modest impact, but collectively they have a huge effect. Person-to-person communications about their museum visitor experiences largely shape and define how society views individual museums as well as museums collectively. These background perceptions of what museums afford form the context for leisure decision making that all of the Franks of the world draw upon when trying to decide what to do in their leisure time.

The museum visitor experience model predicts that, as was the case for Frank, the basic structure and functioning of a museum visitor experience—from behaviors to long-term memories—will largely be determined by an individual’s entering identity-related motivations. If we could have known something about why Frank was visiting the Science Center prior to his visit, and if we could have known a few salient facts about his prior knowledge and experience, we would have been able to make some educated guesses about what his visit that day would have been like. We also could have made some educated guesses about what the general nature of his visit memories would have been. Although, of course, the specifics of Frank’s museum visit experience could not have been predicted in detail beforehand, the general outline of his experience could have been. Frank’s entering identity-related Facilitator motivation created a basic structure and trajectory for his visit. We also could predict that the salience of Frank’s memories would be influenced by his ability to exercise some measure of choice and control over what he and his daughter saw and did (influenced by Frank’s prior knowledge, interests and experience); by the times when his daughter’s interactions with him and the Science Center evoked positive emotions (influenced by verbal and non-verbal communication with his daughter); and by situations when he encountered specific exhibits that allowed him, by virtue of their context and appropriateness, to actualize his identity-related visit goals (influenced by the quality of those exhibits and their spatial arrangement, as well as personal and socio-cultural context variables as well). All of this is by necessity quite complex, but it is not so complex as to prevent us from generically describing and predicting the kinds of Science Center experiences Frank would ultimately find memorable. This, then, is why these ideas are so valuable. Although the museum visit experience model will not allow us to predict with certainty what every visitor will do and remember all of the time, I do believe it allows us to describe and predict the basic shape and trajectory of a large percentage of museum visitor experiences.