The Enlightenment In The Process Of The Ancient Poetry Appreciation

Chinese poem appreciation is a kind of mental processes, which, with the aesthetic psychological structure, readers re-create the words of poem into imageries, and produce a whole image to grasp the profound meaning of the poem. This process often brings the readers a strong sense of insight. Although the psychological mechanisms of poem appreciation process have been widely concerned by the fields of literature, psychology and cognitive linguistics, the process of poem appreciation is so complicated that the research still stays in the phase of theoretical analysis. Luckily, we found that insight was the key link of poem appreciation process, while obtaining poem insight experience and solving of insight problems have very similar psychological processes. Therefore, we selected the insight moment as the entry point, and used guessing-catalytic paradigm to do this research.This study seemed to reveal the cognitive mechanisms of the Chinese poem appreciation by event-related potentials (ERPs). Firstly, we selected300Chinese poem lines which have obvious keywords. Secondly,200lines were selected again as the stimulus in the official experiment. Then18students who were recruited from different departments were asked to complete ERPs experiment. The five participants who didn’t meet the requirements were excluded from the formal analysis.At the begaining of the experiment, we showed the participants the poem liens without the keywords. When the keywords appeared, participants were asked to react according to their "Aha" experience,"no-Aha" experience or "uncomprehended" experience.Results showed that "no-Aha" responses elicited a more negtive ERP deflection (N2) then did "Aha" responses and "uncomprehended" responses in the time windows of150-210ms. This component may reflect the distinguish process. Subsequently,"Aha" responses and "uncomprehended" responses elicited a more positive ERP deflection(P3) than did "no-Aha" responses in the time windows of270-400ms. And P3may report the more cognition endeavor and more cognition resources. Last,"Aha" responses elicited a more positive ERP deflection(P600) than did "no-Aha" and "uncomprehended" responses in the time window500～650ms. The ERP difference wave("Aha" responses minus "no-Aha" responses) showed the peak latency of the component at623ms. And we believe P600is a special component for the insight of Chinese poem. We also found that poem appreciation process aroused the activation of parietal lobe and occipital lobe, and there is a significant right hemispheric dominance. We believe that the activate of the parietal lobe and occipital lobe relate to the formation, application process of the imageries, while right hemispheric dominance reflects that poem appreciation process is related to the formation of a wide range of semantic networks or the remote associates. Indeed, it is only a preliminary study, which need more studies to test and verify. Future research can use more suitable experimental paradigm, with brain imaging techniques to study the cognitive mechanisms of Chinese poem appreciation process and other issues in the literary psychology field.