Very interesting work.

The study compares the museum context to a lab-based exhibition, cleverly presented in Prezi. By doing so, it adds another strong argument to why aesthetic experience should be studied in the actual museum settings.

Some important middle ground still remaining to be explored is the impact of the museum context compared to a non-museum-based 3-dimensional exhibition. Viewing artworks on a computer screen is very likely to engage different oculomotor behaviour and spatial cognition processes compared to a real-life spatial exploration. For example, viewing angles and distances will be much more diverse in 3-D space, and spatial updating of one’s own position in relation to the artworks (and the works in relation to each other from the egocentric perspective) will differ.

These processes are largely responsible for the lasting popularity of physical museum buildings in the era of Google Art Project, and free digital reproductions available from our own living room. Are they more, or less important from the opportunity of experiencing authenticity of artworks and the social context associated with visiting a prestigious museum institution? We still don’t know.

However, we can assume that authenticity of artworks most likely does not directly affect purely biologically-constrained means of spatial exploration and visual attention. Doing things in 3-dimensional space—as opposed to a computer screen—does. It is equally probable that the awareness of being in a museum and of the authenticity of the objects affects higher cognitive processes related to art appreciation. So there seems to be a qualitative distinction between these aspects of ‘the museum context’: one consisting of the authenticity/prestige/expectations from the institution, etc. and the second one being the spatial, 3-dimensional character of the experience.

The authors mention this limitation (Section “Differences in the experience of art between contexts”) and I agree that the (perhaps the most interesting) work to be done is on disentangling ‘the museum context’ from its spatial/physical component.

Some interesting addition to this problem, not mentioned in this paper, has been provided by Tröndle et al. (2014; DOI:10.1080/09647775.2014.888820) who suggest that the ‘museum context’ can be non-existent even in the actual museum building, when an artwork is hung in the foyer, outside of the ‘official’ exhibition space.

Perhaps one way of tackling it would be to compare behaviour in a 'original' museum setting to its 3-dimensional (real or virtual) replica.

But once again - interesting article on a challenging issue.