Colin Martindale was a professor of psychology at the University of Maine for 35 years.
Martindale studied creativity and artistic processes. His most popular work was The Clockwork Muse, in which he argued that artistic development over time in written, visual, and musical works was the result of a search for novelty that could be quantified and studied to the point that art history could be treated as an experimental science.
Martindale was awarded the 1984 American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research.