Literature, Volume 5, Issue 4 (December 2025) – 2 articles

Ease of cognitive processing is an important predictor of aesthetic liking. However, many acclaimed artworks are fairly complex and require substantial cognitive effort. Are they aesthetically liked despite or because of this increased cognitive challenge? The present study pursued this question experimentally. The high syntactic complexity of Heinrich von Kleist’s narratives provided the test case. According to literary scholars, this high syntactic complexity should support increased levels of how “suspenseful,” “intense,” “interesting,” and evocative of a sense of “urgency” the texts are perceived, and it should thereby also support higher overall aesthetic liking. This expectation is in line with recent models in empirical aesthetics according to which higher ease of processing and higher cognitive challenge are not mutually exclusive, but can conjointly drive aesthetic liking to higher levels. The standard hypothesis of cognitive fluency instead predicts a disfluency-driven negative effect on aesthetic liking. We tested these two predictions in two studies by presenting excerpts from Kleist’s narratives in their original vs. syntactically simplified versions to participants. Results differ substantially depending on how the target variables are statistically modeled. If ease of processing and cognitive challenge are modeled separately as predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings, higher ease of processing is a strong positive and higher cognitive challenge a largely negative predictor. However, when the two complementary cognitive variables are modeled conjointly, they are both positive predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings. Their predictive power differs, however, significantly. Only the positive effect of ease of processing is pervasive across all readers. That of cognitive challenge is substantially modified by individual differences. Specifically, it was observed for readers who (1) are of higher age, (2) like to read narratives in general, and (3) reported prior positive experiences with Kleist. Supporting the ecological validity of our findings, readers meeting these criteria are more likely than others to actually read Kleist outside the laboratory. Full article

For this article, we reviewed and synthesized narratological theories on reliability and unreliability and used them as the basis for an exploratory study, examining how real readers respond to a literary short story that contains several unreliable or conflicting narrative accounts. The story we selected is “In a Grove” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (orig. 藪の中/Yabu no naka) from 1922 in the English translation by Jay Rubin from 2007. To investigate how readers evaluate trustworthiness in narrative contexts, we combined quantitative and qualitative methods. We analyzed correlations between reading habits (i.e., Author Recognition Test), cognitive traits (e.g., Need for Cognition; Epistemic Trust), and trust attributions to characters while also examining how narrative sequencing and character-specific reasons for (dis)trust shaped participants’ judgments. This mixed-methods approach allows us to situate narrative trust as a context-sensitive, interpretive process rather than a stable individual disposition. Full article