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Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality

Fictionality and fictional experiences are ubiquitous in people’s everyday lives in the forms of movies, novels, video games, pretense and role playing, and digital technology use. Despite this ubiquity, though, the field of cognitive science has traditionally been dominated by a focus on the real w...

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Autores principales: Gander, Pierre, Szita, Kata, Falck, Andreas, Thompson, William Hedley
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10556239/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37809306
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1205891
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author Gander, Pierre
Szita, Kata
Falck, Andreas
Thompson, William Hedley
author_facet Gander, Pierre
Szita, Kata
Falck, Andreas
Thompson, William Hedley
author_sort Gander, Pierre
collection PubMed
description Fictionality and fictional experiences are ubiquitous in people’s everyday lives in the forms of movies, novels, video games, pretense and role playing, and digital technology use. Despite this ubiquity, though, the field of cognitive science has traditionally been dominated by a focus on the real world. Based on the limited understanding from previous research on questions regarding fictional information and the cognitive processes for distinguishing reality from fiction, we argue for the need for a comprehensive and systematic account that reflects on related phenomena, such as narrative comprehension or imagination embedded into general theories of cognition. This is important as incorporating cognitive processing of fictional events into memory theory reshapes the conceptual map of human memory. In this paper, we highlight future challenges for the cognitive studies of fictionality on conceptual, neurological, and computational levels. Taking on these challenges requires an interdisciplinary approach between fields like developmental psychology, philosophy, and the study of narrative comprehension. Our aim is to build on such interdisciplinarity and provide conclusions on the ways in which new theoretical frameworks of fiction cognition can aid understanding human behaviors in a wide range of aspects of people’s daily lives, media consumption habits, and digital encounters. Our account also has the potential to inform technological innovations related to training intelligent digital systems to distinguish fact and fiction in the source material.
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spelling pubmed-105562392023-10-07 Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality Gander, Pierre Szita, Kata Falck, Andreas Thompson, William Hedley Front Psychol Psychology Fictionality and fictional experiences are ubiquitous in people’s everyday lives in the forms of movies, novels, video games, pretense and role playing, and digital technology use. Despite this ubiquity, though, the field of cognitive science has traditionally been dominated by a focus on the real world. Based on the limited understanding from previous research on questions regarding fictional information and the cognitive processes for distinguishing reality from fiction, we argue for the need for a comprehensive and systematic account that reflects on related phenomena, such as narrative comprehension or imagination embedded into general theories of cognition. This is important as incorporating cognitive processing of fictional events into memory theory reshapes the conceptual map of human memory. In this paper, we highlight future challenges for the cognitive studies of fictionality on conceptual, neurological, and computational levels. Taking on these challenges requires an interdisciplinary approach between fields like developmental psychology, philosophy, and the study of narrative comprehension. Our aim is to build on such interdisciplinarity and provide conclusions on the ways in which new theoretical frameworks of fiction cognition can aid understanding human behaviors in a wide range of aspects of people’s daily lives, media consumption habits, and digital encounters. Our account also has the potential to inform technological innovations related to training intelligent digital systems to distinguish fact and fiction in the source material. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-09-22 /pmc/articles/PMC10556239/ /pubmed/37809306 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1205891 Text en Copyright © 2023 Gander, Szita, Falck and Thompson. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Gander, Pierre
Szita, Kata
Falck, Andreas
Thompson, William Hedley
Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality
title Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality
title_full Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality
title_fullStr Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality
title_full_unstemmed Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality
title_short Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality
title_sort taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10556239/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37809306
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1205891
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