Fictional Worlds and Cognitive Science

• Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, Department of Cognitive Science, CWRU Department of Classical Philology, University of Murcia
• Richard Gerrig, Psychology Department SUNY, Stony Brook U.
• Thalia Goldstein, Department of Psychology Yale U.
• Francis Steen, Department of Communication Studies, UCLA
• Vera Tobin, Cognitive Approaches to Literature, U. of California Santa Barbara

Abstract

The study of how the human mind builds and inhabits intricate fictional worlds has proved to be indispensable to our understanding of representation, meaning construction, social cognition, and many other central issues in Cognitive Science. At the same time, there has been a “cognitive revolution” in the disciplines traditionally interested in fictional worlds, like literary studies or art theory. This symposium presents the latest work of five researchers studying the relation between fictionality and cognition. They employ a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches, and examine fictional worlds in all major literary genres (narrative, lyric, drama), as well as in other modalities such as film or virtual interaction in the WWW.

• The Paper: Fictional Worlds and Cognitive Science

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