Ricerc@Sapienza

Neuroaesthetics, the science studying the biological underpinnings of aesthetic experience,
recently extended its area of investigation to literary art; this was the humus where neurocognitive
poetics blossomed. Divina Commedia represents one of the most important, famous and studied
poems worldwide. Poetry stimuli are characterized by elements (meter and rhyme) promoting
the processing fluency, a core aspect of neuroaesthetics theories. In addition, given the evidence
of different neurophysiological reactions between experts and non-experts in response to artistic
stimuli, the aim of the present study was to investigate, in poetry, a different neurophysiological
cognitive and emotional reaction between Literature (L) and Non-Literature (NL) students. A further
aim was to investigate whether neurophysiological underpinnings would support explanation of
behavioral data. Investigation methods employed: self-report assessments (recognition, appreciation,
content recall) and neurophysiological indexes (approach/withdrawal (AW), cerebral effort (CE)
and galvanic skin response (GSR)). The main behavioral results, according to fluency theories in
aesthetics, suggested in the NL but not in the L group that the appreciation/liking went hand by
hand with the self-declared recognition and with the content recall. The main neurophysiological
results were: (i) higher galvanic skin response in NL, whilst higher CE values in L; (ii) a positive
correlation between AW and CE indexes in both groups. The present results extended previous
evidence relative to figurative art also to auditory poetry stimuli, suggesting an emotional attenuation
“expertise-specific” showed by experts, but increased cognitive processing in response to the stimuli.