Interaction Density as a Behavioural Signature of Exhibit Type: A Minimal-Log Study from a Two-Venue Science Experience Centre

Abstract

Understanding how visitors engage with interactive exhibits usually calls for either labour-intensive manual observation or invasive multimodal sensing -- eye-tracking, cameras, wearables -- that few science centres can deploy at scale. We ask how much can be learned instead from the handful of fields that most touch-enabled exhibits already log by default: a session's start time, end time, and press count. Analysing 2,816 visitor sessions across eight exhibits at two venues of a science experience centre in Bengaluru, India, we derive interaction density -- presses per second -- as a simple behavioural signature, and use it to distinguish fast-paced games from slower, deliberate quizzes. Density does so cleanly (Mann-Whitney r=0.556) and predicts exhibit type on its own with a cross-validated AUC=0.778. But the data complicates the obvious story: games are not just more intense, visitors also dwell on them longer (r=0.172), reversing the intuitive trade-off between intensity and duration -- traced to exhibits whose escalating difficulty creates open-ended re-engagement loops rather than fixed endpoints. Density is not a universal replacement for existing metrics either: raw press count alone explains far more variance in dwell time (R^2=0.527) than density does (R^2=0.081), though combining both improves on either alone (R^2=0.667). Exhibit-level anomalies, a cross-venue replication check, and a session-length censoring artefact further stress-test rather than simply confirm these results. The broader case we make is methodological: minimal, privacy-preserving interaction logs -- not additional sensors -- can already support rigorous, falsifiable behavioural research at any science centre with touch-enabled exhibits.