Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research on empirical aesthetics has only recently included the study of literary texts, and not yet addressed the roleplayed by metaphors. We first created alternative versions of modern poems devoid of literary metaphors but equal inother properties to the original poems. The former are perceived as more beautiful. Second, we had participants readsentences extracted from poems and recorded their reading times and beauty ratings. Sentences could be literal, containdead metaphors, conventional, novel or extremely novel metaphors. Increasingly more novel and creative metaphors leadto increasing aesthetic appreciation, showing a clear linear relationship. Even extremely novel metaphors are appreciated,despite being more difficult to read. These results are only partially in line with current theories. Finally, aestheticappreciation is only partially driven by increasing cognitive load: metaphoricity plays a more important and substantialrole. The contribution of our results to extant theories will be discussed.