Abstract:

A museum functions as an educational institution. An exhibit is one of the typical facilities of a museum. Exhibits are composed not only of tangible materials such as fossils and art objects, but also of specimen labels, explanatory panels, and videos. In particular, the explanatory panel is an important component to convey the museum's research results and the intention of the exhibit to learners. In general, explanatory panels tend to have a high weight of the text. Text-centered explanatory panels can convey a lot of information. On the other hand, it lacks appeal for children and is not conducive to learning. The Toyohashi Museum of Natural History has developed a four-panel manga panel as an alternative to conventional text-based panels. Ito et al. (2020) shows that the use of familiar character and speech balloons can support visitors of all ages to become familiar with manga and to understand the explanations. In addition, we believe that such characters have the effect of guiding learners' eyes in the four-panel manga. Effective use of the character has the potential to focus learners' attention on the text and illustrations that you want them to pay attention to. The effect is considered to be to convey the information necessary for understanding the contents of the exhibition to the learners and to support their learning. In this study, we analyze the effect of the use of the character on the reading of four-panel manga using an eye-tracking device. The purpose of the study is to show the effect of the introduction of characters on the eye movement to the text and illustrations in viewing four-panel manga. Then, we propose that four-panel manga can be useful as a way for exhibition planners to support visitors' learning about the exhibition. We prepared a total of four types of four-panel manga for the evaluation experiment. First, we prepared two types of four-panel manga about paleontology (four-panel manga A about the Burgess fauna and four-panel manga B about mollusks). Next, we developed two different patterns for each of the two types of four-panel manga, one with and one without the character. The participants were 11 elementary school children (4th to 5th grade, 9 valid data). The experiments were conducted on December 13, 2020.

The participants viewed the four four-panel manga in the following order:
1) four-panel manga A (without the character),
2) four-panel manga A (with the character),
3) four-panel manga B (with the character), and
4) four-panel manga B (without the character).

As a preliminary analysis, we analyzed the eye movements of one child while viewing four-panel manga. As a result, we found the following tendency when viewing 4-panel manga with characters. They tended to focus their gaze on the illustration or text in the direction the character was looking at. This tendency was a characteristic difference compared to the gaze shift when viewing four-panel manga without the character. This difference was confirmed regardless of whether the four-panel manga without the character was viewed first or not. These results suggest that their gaze may have been guided by the characters. As a future task, we will analyze the gaze of all participants and clarify the tendency of gaze shifts during the viewing of the four-panel manga explanations.

Keywords:

Manga, Learning support, Exhibit, Museum.