With its cavernous interior and concrete floors, San Francisco’s Exploratorium looks more like an airplane hangar than a museum. In fact, a visible workshop taking up part of the first floor inspires, at least for a moment, thoughts of mysterious projects at Area 51.

But it’s no secret why the 39-year-old science museum is one of the world’s leading institutions for hands-on science education. The Exploratorium is a collection of interactive exhibits that allow visitors to learn about topics ranging from global climate change to the physics of skateboarding. And now, psychological science is in the spotlight with MIND, the museum’s newest exhibit, highlighting the complex and sometimes mysterious processes that govern everyday thinking and behavior.

Taking a Sip of Conflict at the
Exploratorium
(Photo: (c) The Exploratorium,
www.exploratorium.edu
Photo Credit, Amy Snyder)

Know Your Own Mind
MIND’s primary goal is to get visitors to observe and reflect upon their own psychological experiences through a series of interactive exhibits. The exhibits run the gamut of psychological research, but they center around three main themes: attention, emotions, and judgment. At the entry to the MIND exhibition, visitors encounter the first station: an invitation to drink out of a water fountain made from an unused toilet. Drinking from the fountain forces visitors to experience tension between the logical knowledge that the toilet is just as clean as any other water fountain and their visceral reaction that toilets are dirty. In other exhibits, visitors can see themselves sweat through a powerful magnifier, experience how color affects mood by placing their heads in an orb which surrounds them with one color at a time, detect when a friend is lying based on physiological and facial cues, identify emotions based only on eyes, and take an Implicit Association Test by categorizing specially made cards, in addition to many, many more tasks designed to highlight psychological phenomena. Volunteers are often on hand dissecting animal brains and providing a first-hand look at the biological structures involved in the processes that the visitor is learning about.

MIND is the result of four years of meticulous planning, which included collecting input from advisors, brainstorming ideas for exhibits, and contemplating how to market psychology to a generally uninformed public. Several APS Fellows played a prominent role in this process.

APS Fellow Steven Palmer, University of California, Berkeley, has been with the project since its inception. “They …interviewed me about what I thought were some of the most exciting developments in cognitive psychology and cognitive science,” he recalls. “It was a fun afternoon.”
After initial planning, the Exploratorium received a grant from the National Science Foundation, which was used to build prototypes of possible exhibits. Advisors to the exhibition reconvened to evaluate the museum’s progress. “Basically, we got to ‘test drive’ them” says Palmer.
After parsing out what worked and what didn’t, the museum had 40 exhibits encompassing attention, emotion, and judgment areas of research in psychological science.

Reaching the Public
The exhibition is in line with one of APS’s primary missions: the giving away of psychology. The museum hopes to have visitors come away from the exhibition with the understanding of the science of psychology. According to the Exploratorium, “Visitors will learn firsthand that mental and emotional processes — often subtle or even unconscious — are accessible to deep and quantifiable exploration.”  The exhibit also is designed to broaden public perception of the mind beyond just issues of mental illness.

One of the challenges the Exploratorium  faced was determining how to treat the less pleasant workings of our mind. This was a particular concern given the interactive nature of the exhibits, which are designed to educate through direct experience.

Take, for example, the Center of Attention exhibit. Visitors enter a voting booth-like box with a fake lectern and are asked to speak freely. A simulated audience will then cheer or boo while the visitor experiences their emotional and cognitive reactions to being the center of attention. As can be expected, the exhibit can elicit some negative emotions. It is rumored, in fact, that Center of Attention brought one Exploratorium employee to tears during pilot testing.

What results is a constant push and pull for the exhibition to be the comprehensive educational tool it sets out to be while also providing an experience that visitors can deem enjoyable.

“So Completely Different”
Overall, the MIND exhibition has experienced considerable success since it opened its doors in November. “People like them,” says APS Fellow Paul Ekman of the four exhibits based on his own research. “They are crowded most of the time.”

Regardless, the exhibition continues to evolve. In fact, it might become a laboratory itself in the near future. Palmer and the Exploratorium are currently working towards collecting data on the museum floor. This makes sense, as the Exploratorium draws large crowds of diverse people — an ideal testing ground for any researcher looking to boost the ecological validity of their research.

“The idea is that once behavioral scientists know about this opportunity, they could submit requests to the Exploratorium staff and advisors, some appropriate subset of which could then be implemented on the ground floor,” says Palmer.

But, for now, MIND is happy to serve as an interactive playground to explore our complex and interwoven psychological processes that departs from traditional ways of learning about the connections between the brain and behavior.