Visiting Virtual Museums: How Personality and Art-Related Individual Differences Shape Visitor Behavior in an Online Virtual Gallery

The present study explored how personality shapes encounters with art within a virtual art gallery. An online sample of 264 adults completed questionnaires before freely wandering around a virtual gallery, which spanned three rooms and contained 24 artworks (half abstract, half representational) of various sizes and genres. We examined how the Big Five personality traits, aesthetic fluency, and aesthetic responsiveness predicted visit behavior: overall visit time, distance traveled in the gallery, the proportion of time spent viewing artwork, and how long and from what distance people viewed each individual artwork. Openness to experience had widespread effects on virtual visit behaviors, followed by extraversion, and variation in artwork features (area and abstraction) predicted viewing time and distance for individual artworks. We discuss how virtual galleries may contribute to understanding both traditional museum visitors and the emerging study of online virtual visitors.