Unravelling the Progressive Gallery Paradox Behaviour analysis in an art gallery typology through neuroscience and morphology

Concentrating on visitors’ spatial behaviour, this study investigates the ‘progressive gallery’ (PG), an exhibition space typology with sequential arrangement of rooms. Resulting from a doctoral thesis, it bridges space syntax and neuroscience. The impact of PGs on the function of attention is evaluated by computing the response of focus in visitors navigating virtual galleries. The initial hypotheses were: visual fields in PGs are highly intelligible; deterministic layouts lead to more focused visitation experiences, and architectural space has great impact on museum visitation, particularly when trajectories are limited. The overall research departed from analysis of simple hypothetical matrixes and pre-twentieth century gallery layouts, and two emblematic PGs, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Unlimited Growth. It then evolved to analysing complex PG variations, lastly including visitors’ path tracking and capture of focus during immersive virtual reality navigation in such layouts, the focus of this paper. The “Degree of Progression” and the “Index of Variation of Peaks of Focus” are introduced. The first relates to spatial progression through associations with syntactic measures and the second quantifies the variation of focus during visitation. After comparing real visitors’ paths and responses of focus with results from syntactic analyses, a close relationship between spatial geometry and neural responses was observed, which may provide valuable data for curatorial and architectural projects. Findings showed that the coexistence of intelligibility, good intervisibility of fields and a route-defining geometry, contrary to hypothesis, did not necessarily lead to highly focused visitation experiences, revealing the PG paradox.