Abstract / Summary
Abstract Art museums increasingly recognize children as a core audience, yet most interpretive tools remain designed for adults. This study examined whether an interactive, child-centered Toniebox audio guide affected children's visual engagement with paintings, their verbal reports, and their aesthetic emotions, compared with a conventional audio guide and unguided viewing. Forty-five children aged 5 to 13 viewed three paintings from the Kunstpalast collection in Düsseldorf under one of three conditions: free viewing, a conventional audio guide, or the Toniebox guide. A mobile eye tracker recorded gaze during viewing, after which each child completed a semi-structured interview and a child-adapted Aesthetic Emotions Scale. The Toniebox guide directed children's gaze toward the regions it mentioned; the conventional guide did not. At the whole-painting level, the Toniebox guide led to fewer fixations than free viewing, indicating more selective exploration of narrated regions. Both guided conditions increased the number of elements children mentioned in interviews, with neither guide outperforming the other. Self-reported aesthetic emotions did not differ across conditions. These findings show that an interactive, story-based audio guide influences where children look, though self-reported aesthetic emotions were uniformly positive across conditions, with implications for museum education and the design of interpretive tools in galleries.