Chaudhuri, Soma. 2025. Linguistic, behavioural, and neural correlates of evaluation of poetic creativity. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

Poetry is among the most creative forms of expression, captivating readers and offering unique perspectives on thoughts and experiences. Assessing the creativity of poetic expression involves a complex interplay of subjective poetic qualities, readers’ individual differences in psychological traits, and neural mechanisms. While creativity has been extensively studied in visual and auditory art forms, the neurocognitive foundations underlying judgments of poetic creativity remain largely unexplored. This thesis investigates how readers evaluate the creativity of poems through an integrative approach that combines behavioural and neuroscientific methods, along with computational linguistic analysis, to propose an implicit model for evaluating poetic creativity. Central to this research is the question: What makes a poem creative?

The thesis comprises four experiments: three behavioural and one neuroscientific. The first behavioural experiment develops a parsimonious model for evaluating poetic creativity, revealing that a poem’s aesthetic appeal, surprise content, and readers’ emotional valence are key predictors of creativity judgments, moderated by literary expertise. This study also examines how individual differences in readers’ personality traits influence creativity judgments, with openness emerging as the strongest predictor of variability in preferences. The second behavioural study identifies distinct pathways for evaluating creativity and aesthetic appeal, showing minimal overlap—creativity assessment primarily aligns with originality, followed by usefulness and vivid imagery, while aesthetic appeal depends mainly on fluency, followed by emotions and vivid imagery, reflecting creativity’s core traits of originality and usefulness. The third behavioural study investigates poetry’s potential to generate ideas, demonstrating that reading poetry boosts associative thinking and enhances creative ideation, though it does not notably boost out-of-the-box problem-solving. The fourth experiment, a comprehensive neuroscientific investigation using electroencephalography (EEG), consists of two parts: a behavioural study exploring how genre-specific creativity is perceived in the brief, structured poetry genres like Haiku and Senryu, and a neuroscientific study examining the neural correlates underlying creativity perception in these genres. Power spectrum analysis revealed mid-frequency oscillations (theta, alpha, and beta) playing a central role in poetry processing, with genre-specific activity observed in distinct cortical regions, including frontal, fronto-temporal, and parieto-occipital areas. The final section of the thesis summarises all findings and discusses avenues for future research.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Keywords:	Creativity, Poetry, Evaluation, Individual Differences
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Date:	28 February 2025
Item ID:	38675
Date Deposited:	04 Apr 2025 09:51
Last Modified:	04 Apr 2025 09:51
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38675

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