The project achieved the following objectives:
-It drew on current empirical work (e.g. in neuro-cognitive domains and creativity-related research) to develop an empirically tractable discussion of the range of sub-abilities that enable artistic thought states, thereby functioning as their cognitive and neurological infrastructure and show that the components of artistic thought states have psychological reality and empirical testability.
-It developed a discussion of artistic thought states as relevance-yielding occurrences, raising constructive questions about whether the type of relevance achieved by phenomena such as artistic thought states and stimuli such as literature and art falls entirely under Relevance Theory’s cognitive account of worthwhile effects.
-It developed an empirically testable discussion of the wide implications of artistic thought states for 25 years of research in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity. It thereby exceeded initial expectations and state of the art in Year 1, by delivering one ‘extra’ monograph chapter, which yields extensive backward effects on existing research in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity and materializes the bi-directional epistemological framework and interdisciplinary scope of CogLit in an optimal way; also, by means of the ER’s first plenary talk, invited as keynote speaker in the 2020 CogHumanities Conference.
-It determined a further possible type of worthwhile effects (positive perceptual effects) that makes artistic thought states and their outputs (artworks/ literary texts) relevant to the individual organism and drew on neuroscientific findings from visual perception, kinaesthetic perception and music performance to provide tentative evidence that these effects are neurologically real and empirically testable.
-It generated impactful dissemination and wider public engagement deliverables.
-It argued in favour of curricular transformation in HE contexts that will lay the ground for nurturing a new generation of Arts and Humanities graduates able to affect scientific enquiry.
-the tentative evidence and exploitable results on perceptual effects will form the basis of further cutting-edge research on art, attention, agency and the selective directedness of our mental lives.
