Expertise Shapes the Multidimensional Perception of Stories

Storytelling is a primary means of human connection and creative expression, but it is unclear how mechanisms of story perception may vary across people with differing expertise. Here, we examined how expertise in creative storytelling shapes ratings of five dimensions of story quality (creativity, imagination, novelty, complexity, cohesiveness), as well as how these ratings are influenced by four linguistic feature categories (language productivity, lexical predictability, semantic similarity, and lexical composition). Online storytellers (N=18) improvised six spoken stories each (for a total of 108 stories). The transcript of each story was rated by both novices (N=10-31) and creative writing/storytelling experts (N=15) on the five story dimensions and analyzed using the four linguistic feature categories above. Overall, experts and novices provided similar average ratings, and their rating spaces both showed two distinct underlying principal components–essentially, creativity and cohesiveness–which were, in turn, predicted by distinct linguistic features. However, experts perceived the five dimensions as more differentiated, and their ratings were less driven by linguistic features than novices’. These findings indicate that experts’ judgments are more nuanced but also may rely less on fine-grained structural features of narratives, highlighting the importance of capturing individual differences and multidimensionality in story perception.