Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People generally seek to minimize effort, including cognitive effort, but poetic language can be pleasurable while requiring effort to understand. The ‘optimal innovation hypothesis' holds that this paradoxical relationship arises when a non-default interpretation is required and the default interpretation is easily available for comparison. A recent study of ease and pleasure during reading novel variations of familiar verb-based metaphors was partially consistent with this prediction. The present study replicated that pattern of partial support and examined how it is correlated with individual differences in verbal ability, personality (emotionality and openness to experience), and lifestyle/experience (engagement with creative hobbies). Correlations with individual differences tended to be very small and not statistically significant, with two exceptions. First, participants with better verbal ability tended to rate metaphors easier to understand, particularly for familiar metaphors, and a similar pattern was observed for the ‘openness to experience' personality trait. Second, there was a positive association between engagement with creative hobbies and pleasure ratings specifically for the critical ‘optimal' extension metaphors. These results provide a robust basis for future research on the aesthetic experience of metaphors and literary language in general.