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

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.