Abstract
What differentiates the joke writing strategy employed by professional comedians from non-comedians? Previous MRI work found that professional comedians relied to a greater extent on “bottom-up processes,” i.e., associations driven by the prompt stimuli themselves, while controls relied more on prefrontal lobe directed, “top-down” processes. In the present work, professional improv comedians and controls generated humorous captions to cartoons while their eye movements were tracked. Participants’ visual fixation patterns were compared to predictions of the saliency model (Harel et al. in Adv Neural Inf Process Syst 19:545–552, 2007)—a computer model for identifying the most salient locations in an image based on visual features. Captions generated by the participants were rated for funniness by independent raters. Relative to controls, professional comedians’ gaze was driven to a greater extent by the cartoons’ salient visual features. For all participants, captions’ funniness positively correlated with visual attention to salient cartoon features. Results suggest that comedic expertise is associated with increased reliance on bottom-up, stimulus-driven creativity, and that a bottom-up strategy results, on average, in funnier captions whether employed by comedians or controls. The cognitive processes underlying successful comedic creativity appear to adhere to the old comedians’ adage “pay attention to the elephant in the room.”
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© reprinted with permission). Middle right: saliency model predictions of eye-fixations based on low-level features. Left two columns: actual overall fixations of improv comedians and controls during the 3 experimental conditions (HUM, EXP, NOTH). Circles indicate visual fixations. Circle size indicates the total overall time spent fixating on a particular location. Circle color is meaningless, the purpose of varying the color is allowing a better understanding of the heatmaps when the fixation-circles partially overlap. Numbers under the heatmaps are ROC scores—the higher the score, the greater the fit between the model and the fixations
© reprinted with permission). Middle right: saliency model predictions of eye-fixations based on low-level visual features. Left two columns: actual overall fixations of improv comedians and controls during the trials that resulted in captions receiving the higher ratings (top) vs. lower ratings (bottom) all within the humorous condition. Circles indicate visual fixations. Circle size indicates the total overall time spent fixating on a particular location. Circle color is meaningless, the purpose of varying the color is allowing a better understanding of the heatmaps when the fixation-circles partially overlap. Numbers under the heatmaps are ROC scores—the higher the score, the greater the fit between the model and the fixations
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
A saliency of a feature is often defined, in such context, to indicate the degree to which the feature attracts attention in the absence of a goal-oriented task (e.g., during free viewing; see Itti et al. 1998).
Anything that the joke is written about, e.g., a cartoon, improvised scene, news item.
Note that a process of the inhibition of previously activated associations may occur in the absence of top-down intervention (Martindale 2007). This extends to overt attention: in eye-tracking studies in which participates engage in a task free, free viewing of images, participants often do not redirect their gaze into image locations they recently scanned—a phenomenon known as inhibition of return (Wang & Klein, 2010).
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The research was supported by an NSF grant IIS-1948517 to AP and a Pomona College Faculty Grant to OA.
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Amir, O., Utterback, K.J., Lee, J. et al. The elephant in the room: attention to salient scene features increases with comedic expertise. Cogn Process 23, 203–215 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-022-01079-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-022-01079-0