Current Projects
I am currently PI on transdisciplinary interdisciplinary research projects using neuroimaging, such as fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), and behavioural psychology methods to examine the relationship between difficulty and aesthetic experience in the reading of poetry and poetic language, and how that relationship is affected by readers’ goals or mindsets while reading (‘task set’). I am also investigating the effects of poetry on adolescent mental health and wellbeing using qualitative and participatory methods, with the aim of developing a creative reading/writing intervention to support literacy, mental health, and wellbeing for young people. I am also contributing to the development of a counterfactual analysis tool to aid in quantitative research of this kind.
Previous Projects
‘Effects of ease of comprehension and individual differences on the pleasure experienced while reading novelized verb-based metaphors’ (a behavioural study) | Co-Is Dr Daniel Mirman, Melissa Thye | PPLS and LLC, University of Edinburgh
Publications: Errington, P. J, Thye, M., Tao, A., & Mirman, D. (2024). Effects of ease of comprehension and individual differences on the pleasure experienced while reading novelized verb-based metaphors. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2531w7kx
Abstract: 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.
This project was generously supported by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Adaptation Fund.
‘Difficult Language: The Relationship Between Effort and Aesthetic Experience in the Processing of Novel Metaphor’ (a behavioural study) | Co-Is Dr Daniel Mirman, Melissa Thye | PPLS and LLC, University of Edinburgh
Publications: Errington PJ, Thye M, Mirman D (2022). Difficulty and pleasure in the comprehension of verb-based metaphor sentences: A behavioral study. PLoS ONE 17(2): e0263781. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263781
Abstract: What is difficult is not usually pleasurable. Yet, for certain unfamiliar figurative language, like that which is common in poetry, while comprehension is often more difficult than for more conventional language, it is in many cases more pleasurable. Concentrating our investigation on verb-based metaphors, we examined whether and to what degree the novel variations (in the form of verb changes and extensions) of conventional verb metaphors were both more difficult to comprehend and yet induced more pleasure. To test this relationship, we developed a set of 62 familiar metaphor stimuli, each with corresponding optimal and excessive verb variation and metaphor extension conditions, and normed these stimuli using both objective measures and participant subjective ratings. We then tested the pleasure-difficulty relationship with an online behavioral study. Based on Rachel Giora and her colleagues’ ‘optimal innovation hypothesis’, we anticipated an inverse U-shaped relationship between ease and pleasure, with an optimal degree of difficulty, introduced by metaphor variations, producing the highest degree of pleasure when compared to familiar or excessive conditions. Results, however, revealed a more complex picture, with only metaphor extension conditions (not verb variation conditions) producing the anticipated pleasure effects. Individual differences in semantic cognition and verbal reasoning assessed using the Semantic Similarities Test, while clearly influential, further complicated the pleasure-difficulty relationship, suggesting an important avenue for further investigation.
This project was generously supported by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Adaptation Fund.
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‘In Kind: The Enactive Poem and the Co-Creative Response’ | PhD Thesis | School of English, University of St Andrews, 2018
Abstract: How we approach a poem changes it. Recently, it has been suggested that one readerly approach – a bodily orientation characterised by distance, suspicion, and resistance – risks becoming reflexive, pre-conscious, and predominant. This use-oriented reading allows us to destabilise, denaturalise, dissect, defend, and define poetic texts through its manifestation in contemporary literary critique, yet it is coming to be regarded as the sole manner and mood of intelligent, intellectual engagement. In my thesis, I demonstrate the need to pluralise this attentive orientation, particularly when it comes to contemporary lyric poetry. I suggest how an overlooked mode of response might foster a more actively receptive mode of approach: the ‘co-creative’ response.
Lyric poems mean to move us, and they come to mean by moving us. Recent ‘simulation theories of language comprehension’, from the field of cognitive neuroscience, provide empirical evidence that language processing is not a product of a-modal symbol manipulation but rather involves ‘simulations’ by certain classes of neurons in areas used for real-world action and perception. As habituation and abstraction increase, however, these embodied simulations ‘streamline’, becoming narrow schematic ‘shadows’ of once broad, qualitatively rich simulations. Poems, I suggest, seek to reverse this process by situationally novel variations of language, coming to mean in the broadly embodied sense in which real-world experiences ‘mean’. Readers are asked to ‘enact’ the poem, to ‘co-create’ its meaning.
Where critique traditionally requires that readers resist enactive participation in the aim of objective analysis, the co-creative response – a response ‘in kind’ by imitation, versioning, or hommage – asks readers to receive and carry forward the enactive unfolding of a poem with a composition of their own. I assert that, by thus responding with – rather than to – poems, we might foster an attentive stance of active receptivity, thereby coming to understand poems as the enactive phenomena they are.
This project was generously supported by the George Buchanan Scholarship, a Saltire Scholarship, and the University of St Andrews, and was supervised by Profs John Burnside and Don Paterson. It was examined successfully by Prof Peter Stockwell (University of Nottingham) and Dr Tom Jones (University of St Andrews) and passed in November, 2018.
Related Lectures
‘Exploring the Effects of Reader ‘Mindset’ on the Aesthetic Experience of Poetry’ | Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities Conference, University of Catania, Italy, July 2023.
‘Revocation/invocation: Responding to, through, and with the poem’, McGill University / Poetry Matters | McGill University, Canada | September 2023.
‘The phenomenological and neural impact of reader response ‘task sets’ on poetic language processing’ | Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities 2023 | University of Warsaw, Poland | July 2023.
‘The sweet spot: an optimal defamiliarisation of conventional metaphors’ | British Society of Literature and Science 17th Annual Conference, Manchester | April 2022.
‘Reading With’ | Perception and Expressive Culture, York University, Toronto / Online | February 2022.
‘Beyond Critical: A Case for Responding with Poetry’ | Cognitive Futures in the Humanities Conference, University of Kent, UK | July 2018.
‘In Kind: How a Co-Creative Response Encourages Enactive Reading of Poetry’ | Educational Role of Language Conference, Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, Vilnius, Lithuania, June 2018.
‘Immersive Poetics: Creative Response Writing as an Enactive Approach to Poetry’ | English: Shared Futures, Newcastle University, July 2017
‘The Body In Mind: Poetry and the Re-Embodiment of Abstract Thought’ | Contemporary Poetry: Thinking & Feeling, Plymouth University, May 2016
Current Teaching
University of Edinburgh | Early Career Research & Teaching Fellow (Creative Writing)
School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures | Office 2.53, 50 George Square
University of St Andrews | Visiting Scholar (English Literature and Creative Writing)
School of English | Castle House, St Andrews, KY16 9AL
University of Dundee | Visiting Writer
School of Humanities | Tower Building, Nethergate
Previous Teaching
Edinburgh Napier University | Associate Lecturer (English and Film)
School of Arts and Creative Industries | Office G6, Merchiston Campus
University of Dundee | Creative Writing Tutor (Creative Writing)
School of Humanities | Tower Building, Nethergate
Residencies
Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities Researcher in Residence | Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Scotland | May 2018