The Museum of Science (MoS) is a science museum and indoor zoo in Boston, Massachusetts, located in Science Park, a plot of land spanning the Charles River. Along with over 700 interactive exhibits, the museum features a number of live presentations throughout the building every day, along with shows at the Charles Hayden Planetarium and the Mugar Omni Theater, the only domed IMAX screen in New England. The museum is also an accredited member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and is home to over 100 animals, many of which have been rescued and rehabilitated..
With the rapid growth of heritage tourism and increasing demands for museums to attract diverse audiences, understanding visitors’ emotional engagement and satisfaction has gained significant importance. Capturing and analyzing fleeting emotions and feelings in real-time provides critical insights into visitor behavior, offering opportunities to enhance visitor experiences, improve satisfaction, and support heritage conservation efforts. This underscores the need for innovative, technology-driven solutions to effectively evaluate and understand these emotional responses. Micro-expressions (MEs), fleeting and subtle FEs that reflect underlying emotions, are of significant importance for understanding human behavior. Automatic recognition of MEs is critical for applications that aim to discern true emotions, such as visitor experience analysis in museum settings. However, existing ME datasets are often limited to laboratory settings, which do not reflect the complexity and variability of real-world situations. To address this issue, we developed a novel spontaneous ME dataset in a museum setting (SMEM) comprising 127 participants and 344 ME video clips that were categorized into four basic types (negative, positive, surprise, and others). The onset frame, apex frame, offset frame, and action units (AUs) of each ME sample were annotated to accurately describe the facial movements. For baseline evaluation, we adopted optical flow to extract hand-crafted features of facial movements for ME apex spotting and designed a shallow CNN model with a cross-attention module to perform ME recognition with the optical flow as input. Our results show that the CNN method achieved a promising result for ME recognition in a real-world environment. The study provides a valuable contribution to the field of automatic ME recognition in real-world settings and highlights the potential of using ME recognition in museum visitor experience analysis.
Stem cell-based models of the human brain benefit from biospecimens that can be used for a broad range of future research. But current regulations do not address the desire of research participants to remain engaged beyond initial biospecimen donation. We present practicable strategies for engaging participants while preserving scientific potential.
Transdisciplinary research holds promise for helping science education scholars conduct innovative and novel research. However, current preparation for academic careers takes place within disciplinary boundaries, leading to the development of socially constructed and interactional intellectual orientations to other disciplines limited by these disciplinary boundaries. This challenges the development of disciplinary orientations conducive to transdisciplinary research. To address issues in fostering transdisciplinary orientations, we focus on the quandaries of reflection, paradox, and integration and answer them with reflexivity, pragmatism, and dialogue. Through a worked example of a dialogic reflexivity process, we demonstrate how these responses can cultivate transdisciplinary orientations. Transdisciplinary research in preK-12 education can help address complex problems in critical areas such as systemic injustices. Furthermore, there is a strong motivation for developing transdisciplinary orientations in preK-12 science education. Engaging in dialogic reflexivity can advance the critical development of transdisciplinary orientations by fostering openness in students to listen to the ideas of others, exposing them to more than just dominant paradigms, and encouraging creative thinking to solve challenges problems.
