Colin Martindale (March 21, 1943 – November 16, 2008) was a professor of

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

at the

University of Maine The University of Maine (UMaine or UMO) is a public land-grant research university in Orono, Maine. It was established in 1865 as the land-grant college of Maine and is the flagship university of the University of Maine System. It is classifi ...

for 35 years. Martindale studied

creativity Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed literary w ...

and artistic processes. His most popular work was ''The Clockwork Muse'' (1990), in which he argued that artistic development over time in written, visual, and musical works was the result of a search for

novelty Novelty (derived from Latin word ''novus'' for "new") is the quality of being new, or following from that, of being striking, original or unusual. Novelty may be the shared experience of a new cultural phenomenon or the subjective perception of an ...

that could be quantified and studied to the point that art history could be treated as an experimental science.Psychology Today: "Remembering Colin Martindale"
/ref> Martindale was awarded the 1984 American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research.

Bibliography

*''Romantic Progression: The Psychology of Literary History'', Hemisphere Pub., June 1, 1975, *''Cognition and consciousness'' (The Dorsey series in psychology, Dorsey Press, 1981, * ''The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change'', New York: Basic Books, 1990, * ''Evolutionary and neurocognitive approaches to aesthetics, creativity, and the arts'', Amityville, NY: Baywood Pub., 2007,

References

External links

Bangor Dailey News obituary
{{DEFAULTSORT:Martindale, Colin 20th-century American psychologists University of Maine faculty University of Colorado alumni Harvard University alumni 1943 births 2008 deaths People from Fort Morgan, Colorado