Museums, Visitors and the (Peak) End of Memory Lane

Museums are increasingly under pressure. On one side sit financial strain, both prior to and brought on by, the COVID pandemic, as well as a growing array of other leisure time pursuits to compete against. On the other, increasing pressure from some audiences to be seen to stand for something – or against it. Black Lives Matter, de-colonisation debates and the climate emergency are all examples given in this year’s Visitor Studies Group call for papers for instance.

For me, if museums and cultural organisations are seeking to address real challenges, we need to see and understand the extent to which what we are talking about or displaying is having an impact. We need to make people stop and think. We need to make them remember.

A slight digression…

For several years now, I’ve been acutely aware that many of my memories are created. I first stumbled across this by accident, as part of a wider reading round of behavioral economics and psychology when the former became increasingly popular within the market research industry.

The more I thought about how my own brain worked, and spent more time thinking about thinking, the more I became aware that many - in fact most - of my memories are in the third person.

To show you what I mean, close your eyes and think back to the last time you went out for a meal with friends, a walk with your dog, or a party, say. Can you see a meal on a plate? A footpath and your feet? Your hand in-front of you holding a glass?

Or, in some cases atleast, do you see yourself? Sat at a table? Walking down a path? Dancing and drinking with other people?

There is no right or wrong answer, and most people remember in a mixture of the two ways – e.g. first person or third person..

Why is this important?

What I’m trying to demonstrate is that those memories where we are seeing ourselves in the third person cannot be our actual experience of the moment; they are curated memories – not only remembered in a specific way at a specific time but also able to morph and change over time, and in extreme cases, to be completely created out of the blue.[1] It is also very rare that people remember ‘everything’.[2]

This then begs the question, how do we ‘decide’ what to remember?

And beyond that: how can organisations trying to encourage learning or to communicate an idea or purpose (for instance, increasingly, Museums), make sure that we remember the bits they want us to?

Some potential approaches

One of the angles we might look at this from is the purpose of memory.

Memory is in part there to help us navigate our everyday lives and to help us survive. For instance, if we had to work out whether a specific berry was poisonous or not every time we encountered a bush, or if we had to re-learn butchery (or arrow-making) every time our ancestors wanted to carve up a mammoth, we probably wouldn’t have lasted very long. We’d also get pretty good at running from sabre-tooth tigers because they bite, that hurts, and we remember the pain in the form of fear.

Thus, things we do often, things we’ve found useful, or things that generate strong emotions (positive or negative) within us are more likely to be predictors of what is worth remembering. Indeed, studies show that stories and images that trigger emotion are remembered in more detail and for longer than similar stories or images without emotional connotations.[3]

A smaller scale study with one of my colleagues supports this. I asked her over lunch if she had any good memories of Museums:

“Emotional stuff is the stuff that sticks, or is useful - human connection. I walk round the Natural History Museum and it has no emotional connection to me, but I walk round the Anne Frank Museum and see a pair of shoes...and I'll never forget that."[4]

So: if we can connect with audiences and visitors on a human, emotional level, that’s a great place to be.

Another potential approach is looking at the functionality of memory. Peter Doolitte - an educational psychologist from Virginia Tech – says we can remember about 4 things for 10-20 seconds with our working memory unless we do something with it; talk to someone, write it down, or process it in some other way. [5]

This functional memory is limited, and we see this all the time – how many times have you opened a kitchen drawer and not been able to remember why? Read a text, been distracted for a second, then completely forgotten to reply? Driven to Tesco with the ambition of buying some oat milk and avocado, because you're aggressively middle-class now, and come away with lager and some sausage rolls. There’s probably other stuff at play there in the last one, but it’s why they tell people who want to budget to write a list before going shopping. Hard to remember the Oatly when there’s a case of Staropramen in your face.[6]

So: if we can encourage audiences to commit something to memory, the likelihood of them remembering it will increase.

And finally, we can think about storage space. It’s clear the vast majority of us don’t remember every single second of every single day. In some ways, this comes back to the idea of memory being there as a survival tool. If you were remembering everything, the sheer amount of time to try and recall a prior event or experience would be a potential risk factor/opportunity cost. We're actually seeing this now with datasets so large that conventional databases simply can't efficiently deliver results quickly enough.

This idea (storage, not computers) brings us to Peak-End.

What is Peak-End?

Peak-end theory was created by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahnemann who, basically, says that instead of remembering the whole experience (storage space) or taking an average across the whole thing, we focus on the highlights, and the end.

“The peak-end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e. its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”

Chip and Dan Heath paraphrased this later, to the same broad meaning:

“When people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length. Instead, they seem to rate the experience based on two key moments: first, ?the best or worst moment, known as the peak, and second, the ending… when we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute sensations.”

Taking this, here are a few examples which could be applied to museum experiences:

Make sure the end is better than the rest: the first example is the 1993 study by Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson, which illustrated the extent to which our memory does not give a perfect empirical recollection of events, and can result in seemingly irrational decisions.

The research team asked study participants to hold their hands in a tub of water – cold enough to definitely be uncomfortable, but not so cold as to be painful.[7] A series of short trials were conducted; with the trial ensuring that participants swapped which hand was submerged between trials and also alternating the order of temperatures to remove those biases. The experiment involved three rounds:

Round 1: 1 minute at 14 degrees Celsius[8]

Round 2: 1 minute at 14 degrees Celsius and then by 30 seconds at 15 degrees Celsius

Round 3: Option to choose whether to repeat Round 1 or Round 2

The most logical choice would have been to repeat Round 1. Water is still obnoxiously chilly at 15 degrees, so rationally, one would choose 60 seconds of discomfort instead of 90 seconds. However, the results overwhelmingly suggest that the ever so slightly less uncomfortable final 30 seconds changed how people perceived the entirety of Round 2. 80% of the study participants preferred Round 2 and chose to repeat that condition in the final trial.[9]

A small improvement near the end of an experience radically shifted people’s perception of that event.

Do less really well, rather than more that is mediocre: Do et. al (2008) applied the peak-end concepts to material items. They explored the 'impact of positivity and timing on the post-event assessments of material goods' (Translation: they tested how happy kids were after giving them stuff – in this case chocolate).[10]

They learned that children were happier after receiving a single chocolate treat alone, compared to when they received the same chocolate bar followed by a piece of chewing gum. Children preferred only the chocolate, even though it was empirically a worse deal (one treat vs. two) because their retrospective assessments of their enjoyment were most affected by the end of the experience. Providing the gum after the treat caused the experience as a whole to be less pleasurable for them, because chewing gum is not as nice as chocolate.

There's a great quote by a chap called Antoine de?Saint-Exupéry which sums this idea up nicely, or is atleast something to keep in mind:

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to?take away."

Use this rule to deliver evaluation: Two experiments have checked to see whether peak-end influences how primary school students are affected by peer assessments. In both experiments, two classmates received assessments on their behavior in school and then also received two manipulated assessments.

In Experiment 1 (30 kids), one assessment consisted of four negative ratings and the other of four clearly negative ratings with an extra slighly-less negative rating added to the end.

In Experiment 2 (44 kids), one assessment consisted of four clearly positive ratings, and the other added an extra slightly-less positive rating to the end.

As we might now expect given I'm including this in this article, the five-rating assessment in Experiment 1 (e.g. four negative, followed by one moderately negative) and the four-rating assessment in Experiment 2 (e.g. all four positive, no moderately positive final rating) were remembered as more pleasant and less difficult to deal with. This shaped children's peer assessment preferences and prospective choices of which assessment to repeat. These findings indicate that the process of peer assessment can be improved by ending the feedback with the most positive part of the assessment.[11]

Bringing this to a museum context

Based on the above, it seems to me like there are five practical things Museums might do to help us really commit an experience to memory, and hopefully to embed whatever learnings visitors might have gained. These are:

Connect emotionally – whether it’s finding the human story or just telling a really sad one, we remember the stuff that makes us feel good/bad/sad/scared/sexy/astounded – embrace it

Commit it to memory – encourage visitors to move things from their working memory in to their longer term memory, get them to write, tell, share, draw or 'whatever' it.

All Killer, No Filler - yes, this is a Sum41 reference, but maybe sometimes less is more, particularly when budgets are tight. Move visitors from one Peak to the next, and save the best until last, because...

…Last impressions are lasting impressions - the last thing someone experiences is likely to be the thing they remember most. Bear in mind, the last experience of many museums is a gift shop…yeah...

And internally, think about how you present evaluation – finish on the good stuff – as a research and evaluation professional I believe we absolutely need to create a culture where people aren’t afraid that something not working 100% brilliantly is going to result in funders ripping the money-carpet out from underneath them. I strongly support the idea of regular failure, in part through the necessity to maintain my own self-esteem, but largely because it shows that at least you’re trying. I never thought I'd quote Denzel Washington (yes, Blade) but 'If you don't fail, you're not even trying.'

As Museums increasingly become more active[12], and the challenges the sector is trying to face up to, educate on and be part of overcoming, become larger and more complex[13], we need evaluation and we need to be honest about successes and failures – this means colleagues from across organisations being involved and welcoming evaluation. It will be a lot easier if their memory of the experience is quite nice.

Any examples?

I’d love to hear your own examples, and that’s what the comments are for, but I do have one example which I always remember (ha…) quite strongly.[14]

European Solidarity Centre

THE TRIUMPH OF FREEDOM

The disintegration of the Soviet Union was one of the most important events of the late 20th century. The bloodless revolution in Poland led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and to the collapse of dictatorships in one Central and Eastern European country after another. The process of building Europe’s new political and economic order began. Messages from the exhibition’s visitors make up a giant SOLIDARNO?? logo. People come here to read each other’s messages, many are moved to tears. Here you can find expressions of gratitude for freedom, the pain of Ukraine’s bloody revolution, wishes for peace for war-torn Africa, dreams of justice, hope for migrants, joy of freedom. We want your message to be seen too!

The above is taken from the European Solidarity Centre’s website and describes what is the penultimate space you visit in their permanent exhibition - I've provided a couple of my own images below.

For me, and I speak as someone who entered knowing very, very little about the Solidarity movement and the role it played in communist Poland, the whole exhibition was incredibly emotional. They make excellent use of digital technology, there are original artefects, films of speeches, all the good stuff.

The penultimate room though, The Triumph of Freedom, is a great example of:

-???????connecting emotionally - both throughout the whole exhibition, but also with others through what they write

-???????committing to memory – you write something and add your post-it-note to the thousands already there

-???????leaving a lasting impression – the sheer scale and number of notes is striking, and standing back to see the Solidarity Movement logo is amazing, my photo doesn't really do the scale justice.

-???????doing less exceptionally-?there are only seven rooms which make up the permanent collection – of which the last two are really there to create a space for de-compression. It’s an excellent and clear way to control how the experience ends, without funneling people in to the museum shop, and allow room for emotional introspection, for people to commit it to memory.

Am I saying this would work for everyone and everyone museum in the world. Of course not, but particularly where we are talking about big topics, an area for reflection is something to consider.

Beyond that, it’s about ￡30 for a plane ticket to Gdansk and it’s worth a trip.

[1] https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XQze2hIAAGYP8ckl; https://journals.healio.com/doi/10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07

[2] This is called hyperthymesia, and is often confused with an eidetic memory. There have been around 60 diagnoses of hyperthymesia in the world to 2021.

[3] Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (1995). “A novel demonstration of enhanced memory associated with emotional arousal”. Consciousness and Cognition, 4:410–421.

[4] This is her opinion based on a visit many years ago. The NHM clearly has a focus on human interaction with nature and the natural world for good and ill – however, if people remember the dinosaurs and the big whale, this is kind of my point.

[5]https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_doolittle_how_your_working_memory_makes_sense_of_the_world?language=en

[6] Other lagers are available.

[7] Ethics..etc etc.

[8] For reference, if like me you are from the North of England, this is a sturdy tee-shirt, possibly a jumper, but definitely not Big Coat Weather.

[9] Kahneman, Daniel; Fredrickson, Barbara L.; Schreiber, Charles A.; Redelmeier, Donald A. (1993). "When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End". Psychological Science. (pp. 401-405).

[10] Amy Do, Alexander Rupert and George Wolford , “Evaluations of pleasurable experiences: The peak–end rule”, February 2008, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15(1):96-8,

[11] Hoogerheide, Vincent; Vink, Marleen; Finn, Bridgid; Raes, An K.; Paas, Fred (2018). “How to Bring the News … Peak-end Effects in Children’s Affective Responses to Peer Assessments of Their Social Behavior”. Cognition and Emotion. 32 (5): 1114–1121.

[12] We’ve Declared A Climate Emergency, Museums are not neutral

[13] The Museum of the UN already doing work at the intersection of arts, health and climate change, for instance.

[14] Comments are also for: disagreements, other examples of memory/peak-end, pictures of cats, how this maps on to other biases/behavioural considerations etc. Mostly pictures of cats though, if we could.