
## Method

Participants The same seven University of British Columbia advanced undergraduate creative writing students who participated in Study 2 also participated in Study 3. 

They were highly familiar with each other's writing, but unfamiliar with each other's art.

Materials Each creative writing student brought one piece of covered art to the professor's office. They were asked to hide their signature and any other identifying feature. Before the study, the paintings were examined to ensure that signatures and other identifying features had been hidden. 

Procedure The students were shown unsigned art done by classmates. They were given a questionnaire and asked to guess which classmate did which piece of art. As above, for each answer they were also asked to state on a scale of 1-3 how certain they were that they had not encountered the work before. If they had seen the piece before, or thought they might have seen it before, their answer was not included in the analysis. Less than 5% of scores were discarded from the analysis.

## Results

The mean proportion correct was .39 (SD = .27). The proportion correct that would have been obtained on the basis of random guesses is .17. This difference is significant, t(6) = 2.2, p < 0.03, r = .67. Thus creative writing students were able to identify above chance which of their classmates created a given work in a domain *other* than writing, specifically art.

## Discussion And Conclusions

The experiments with artists and writers reported here provide support for the hypothesis that different works by the same creator exhibit a recognizable style or 'voice', and that this recognizable quality even comes through in different creative outlets. Art students were able to distinguish significantly above chance which famous artists created pieces of art they had not seen before. They also correctly identified their classmates' art significantly above chance. Similarly, creative writing students correctly identified significantly above chance passages by famous writers that they had not encountered before, and correctly identified their classmates' writing significantly above chance. Creative writing students additionally correctly identified significantly above chance works of art produced by classmates. (The opposite study, determining whether art students correctly identify written passages generated by their classmates, has not yet been carried out.)
The higher recognizability of artistic style (study 1) than writer's style (study 2) comes as a surprise. It cannot be entirely due to the famous artists coming from a wider range of eras and locales than the famous writers, for if that were the correct explanation, the recognizability of classmates' art in Study 1 and classmates' writing in Study 2 should have been comparable. Perhaps there are fewer constraints on artists, i.e. fewer demands that the work 'make sense', 
and it need not exhibit plot structure or character development. Thus there may be more acceptable ways of 
'doing one's own thing'. The analysis takes into account that there were twice as many writers to choose from as artists, but in future studies the number of famous artists and writers will be the same, in order to make the studies as comparable as possible. 

The results support the hypothesis that creators have a recognizable style. These findings are not predicted by theories of creativity that emphasize chance processes or the accumulation of expertise. If creative output is a matter of chance or the acquisition of expertise, then what is the source of this identifiable personal style? These findings are, however, predicted by honing theory, according to which personal style reflects the uniquely honed structure of an individual's worldview. The finding that creative writing students were able to identify above chance which of their classmates created a given work in a domain *other* than writing, specifically art, supports the prediction that creators hone a uniquely structured worldview that exhibits a style that is recognizable not just within a domain but across domains. Further experiments are underway to replicate these findings with larger groups of participants, and adapt the general procedure to study the recognizability of style within and across domains using trained jazz musicians.

It is worth pointing out explicitly how this approach, and in particular the investigation of recognizable cross-domain style, differs from typical attempts to determine to what extent higher cognition is domain-general versus domainspecific, or modular. As mentioned in the introduction, it is commonly assumed that this issue can be resolved by determining to what extent ratings of expertise in one domain are correlated with ratings of expertise in another. An unspoken assumption here is that measurements of expertise are all that is needed to detect any sort of quality that might characterize or unify an individual's creative or intellectual ventures, and indeed that the outputs of higher cognitive processes are objectively comparable. But the reality is that while manifestations of higher cognition are sometimes comparable, even quantitatively, often there is little objective basis for comparison. The present results suggest that higher cognition is domain general not in the sense that expertise in one enterprise guarantees expertise in another, but in the sense that there are multiple interacting venues for creative exploration and self-expression open to any individual, and through which that individual's worldview may be gleaned. It may be that our potential for cross-domain learning is only just beginning to be exploited, through ventures such as the Learning through the Arts program in Canada, in which students, for example, learn mathematics through dance, or learn about food chains through the creation of visual art. It seems reasonable that if knowledge is *presented* in compartmentalized chunks, students end up with a compartmentalized understanding of the world, while if knowledge were presented more 