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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...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2023
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10556239 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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