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What Shall I Write Next?: Subliminal and Supraliminal Priming as Triggers for Creative Writing

Published: 19 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Creative writing requires the manipulation of language in demanding ways, as individuals attempt to uniquely express themselves. As a result, during creative writing people often experience the writer's block: a stress reaction that affects their ability to write. Addressing this problem, creativity support tools have been incorporating story prompts to instigate the creative process. However, such strategies distract the user from the writing task and impose cognitive load to get over the block. In this paper, we investigate subliminal priming as a novel technique to support creative writing. We developed a text-editor that provides conscious and unconscious textual hints during a writing task and explored its impact on user's self-experienced creativity. Results showed that participants in the subliminal condition experienced more loss of self-consciousness when compared to the control condition. Self-report data revealed higher loss of self-consciousness in the subliminal condition while the analysis of eye-tracking data and verbal-accounts revealed a stronger influence on people's thoughts during the supraliminal condition. We report our findings and conclude with insights for future research.

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  1. What Shall I Write Next?: Subliminal and Supraliminal Priming as Triggers for Creative Writing

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ECCE '17: Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics
    September 2017
    214 pages
    ISBN:9781450352567
    DOI:10.1145/3121283
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • EACE: European Association for Cognitive Ergonomics
    • Umeå University

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    Publication History

    Published: 19 September 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. Creativity Support Index
    2. Creativity Support Tools
    3. Subliminal priming

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    ECCE '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 54 submissions, 54%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 56 of 91 submissions, 62%

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)CharacterMeet: Supporting Creative Writers' Entire Story Character Construction Processes Through Conversation with LLM-Powered Chatbot AvatarsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642105(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2022)Triggers, beginnings, and poetry making: the literacy practices of older Australian poetry writersInternational Journal of Lifelong Education10.1080/02601370.2022.210596841:4-5(450-464)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2022
    • (2021)Revisiting the Role of User Research in Design CreativityProceedings of the 32nd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics10.1145/3452853.3452857(1-5)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2021
    • (2021)Poetry Machines: Eliciting Designs for Interactive Writing Tools from PoetsProceedings of the 13th Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3450741.3466813(1-5)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2021
    • (2021)SonAmi: A Tangible Creativity Support Tool for Productive ProcrastinationProceedings of the 13th Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3450741.3465250(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2021
    • (2021)User research and design creativity: three insights for future studiesBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2021.191976140:5(464-475)Online publication date: 10-May-2021
    • (2019)How Time Constraints in a Creativity Support Tool Affect the Creative Writing ExperienceProceedings of the 31st European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics10.1145/3335082.3335084(100-107)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2019
    • (2019)Enhancing Your Mental Well-Being and Creativity While Writing: A Crowdsource-Based ApproachHuman Work Interaction Design. Designing Engaging Automation10.1007/978-3-030-05297-3_2(17-35)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
    • (2018)Exploring the Feasibility of Subliminal Priming on Web platformsProceedings of the 36th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics10.1145/3232078.3232095(1-11)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2018

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