NeuroDante: Poetry Mentally Engages More Experts but Moves More Non-Experts, and for Both the Cerebral Approach Tendency Goes Hand in Hand with the Cerebral Effort.

Fabio Babiloni,Paolo Canettieri,Roberto Rea,Anton Giulio Maglione,Ana C. Martinez Levy,Mariella Combi,Enrica Modica,Patrizia Cherubino,Giulia Cartocci,Luca Gatti,Dario Rossi

doi:10.3390/brainsci11030281

Abstract

Neuroaesthetics, the science studying the biological underpinnings of aesthetic experience, recently extended its area of investigation to literary art; this was the humus where neurocognitive poetics blossomed. Divina Commedia represents one of the most important, famous and studied poems worldwide. Poetry stimuli are characterized by elements (meter and rhyme) promoting the processing fluency, a core aspect of neuroaesthetics theories. In addition, given the evidence of different neurophysiological reactions between experts and non-experts in response to artistic stimuli, the aim of the present study was to investigate, in poetry, a different neurophysiological cognitive and emotional reaction between Literature (L) and Non-Literature (NL) students. A further aim was to investigate whether neurophysiological underpinnings would support explanation of behavioral data. Investigation methods employed: self-report assessments (recognition, appreciation, content recall) and neurophysiological indexes (approach/withdrawal (AW), cerebral effort (CE) and galvanic skin response (GSR)). The main behavioral results, according to fluency theories in aesthetics, suggested in the NL but not in the L group that the appreciation/liking went hand by hand with the self-declared recognition and with the content recall. The main neurophysiological results were: (i) higher galvanic skin response in NL, whilst higher CE values in L; (ii) a positive correlation between AW and CE indexes in both groups. The present results extended previous evidence relative to figurative art also to auditory poetry stimuli, suggesting an emotional attenuation “expertise-specific” showed by experts, but increased cognitive processing in response to the stimuli.

Highlights

Such an area of investigation is more classically focused on figurative arts, but it has been widening its areas of interest to text material, as witnessed by the neurocognitive poetics, which saw its dawn around 10 years ago and is defined as “the transdisciplinary empirical investigation of and theorizing about literature reception by eye or ear including its neuronal underpinnings” [3]
Concerning the emotional reaction to the entire cantica, as suggested by the arousal level indexed by the galvanic skin response (GSR), we found a higher reaction by NL in comparison to L students level indexed by the GSR, we found a higher reaction by NL in comparison to L students for for the Inferno 2(Chi2 = 5.47, p = 0.02) and values just missing the significance for the Purthe Inferno
Experts resulted to be more cognitively engaged on the same stimuli segments, further supporting the suggestion that time of exposure to an artistic stimulus constitutes a matter of importance [34,46]; It was suggested that for the formation of declarative judgements non-experts would more strictly rely on the ease of processing, based on previous knowledge of the artistic stimuli, while experts would rely more to the cerebral processing in response to the stimuli, more to top-down processes

Summary

Introduction

Neuroaesthetics is a growing field of research investigating the neurobiological correlations of the aesthetic experience [1,2] Such an area of investigation is more classically focused on figurative arts, but it has been widening its areas of interest to text material, as witnessed by the neurocognitive poetics, which saw its dawn around 10 years ago and is defined as “the transdisciplinary empirical investigation of and theorizing about (poetic) literature reception by eye or ear including its neuronal underpinnings” [3]. A core element of the neurocognitive poetic model [3] is the fiction feeling hypothesis Such hypothesis was born from the evidence that the medial and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex activation (OFC), known to be involved in social cognition, was engaged when processing stories with an emotional content, stories that would elicit affective and cognitive empathy in the reader [5].

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