Today’s museums are much more than repositories for the preservation of ancient artifacts. They are served as centers for learning, community centers, and even places for an exchange of ideas and discussions. We now understand that a museum visit is not simply an encounter for an eager visiting public who soaks up the knowledge articulated by the curatorial team. The museum experience is more about a multi-layered journey which is proprioceptive, sensory, intellectual, aesthetic, and social. In that context, this paper takes the case on fishermen’s daily life multisensory area in the folk exhibition of Taizhou Museum as an example, integrates the qualitative and quantitative research approaches in museum and analyzes the practical effect and relative merits of the multi-senses used in this exhibition through the lens of the cognitive effect and communication evaluation. Accordingly, museums should be more concerned with the combination and complex interaction between “body” and experience, as well as visual, auditory, olfactory, taste, and proprioceptive experiences and focus on the potential impact on museum visitors in cognitive, emotional and other aspects. In a nutshell, the above-mentioned suggestion is serving as an important direction for the future development of museums, and also a key and valued point of this paper.

museum experience  /  multisensory  /  phenomenon  /  evaluation  /  emotional cognition