Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current research examines the degree to which thematic/referential music affects performance in Amabiles AmericanHaiku task. Thematic music conveys meaning to the listener by activating concepts associated with the music in semanticmemory. Ward (1994) demonstrated that generating novel exemplars is influenced by activated concepts in memory. Con-sequently, participants listening to thematic music before writing a haiku should be more likely to incorporate thematicelements into the haiku which increases the perceived creativity of the haiku. Participants specifically instructed to incor-porate thematic elements into the haiku should include more thematic elements and write more creatively than participantsnot instructed to include thematic elements and participants who wrote their haiku without having listened to thematicmusic beforehand. 206 undergraduates listened to a 90 second sample of unfamiliar lullaby- or war-themed music. Partic-ipants were instructed to write a haiku inspired by the music (Inspire), write a haiku after listening to the music (Neutral)or write a haiku before listening to the music (Control). We found a significant main effect of the Inspire instruction onincorporation of thematic elements into the haiku. Participants in the Inspire condition included significantly more the-matic elements of the music into their haiku than participants in the Neutral condition or Control conditions. Participantsin the Inspired condition wrote haikus that were marginally more likely to be rated as more negatively valenced and weremore creative than the haikus written in the Neutral and Control conditions. Results suggest ways of increasing creativitythrough use of thematic music.