What is it about?
People spend considerable amounts of time on movies, novels, comic books, video games, role playing, and pretense. In doing so, they experience, remember, and discuss fictional information and imaginary worlds. Research on thinking has mostly assumed that people solve tasks and remember facts about the real world. We want to highlight how considering also thinking about fictional information could change the way researchers understand human thinking.
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Why is it important?
We point out that important paths of research open when also considering that people handle fictional information. For example, on a daily basis, people need to make distinctions between real and fictional information. How is this done? Another example is that future social robots may need to be equipped with the ability to handle fictional information to work adequately in human home environments.
Perspectives
The point of writing this article is to show that there is an implicit assumption in research on thinking, that humans deal only with factual information in a real world. Commonly, theories of how people take in information and remember do not account for fictional information. This is most obviously seen when looking at how social robots are designed - if such robots take everything around them as factual, there may be serious consequences, such as that a household robot may contact emergency services when exposed to a fictional action movie showing on the living room television screen.
Pierre Gander
Goteborgs Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Taking the unreal seriously: enriching cognitive science with the notion of fictionality, Frontiers in Psychology, September 2023, Frontiers,
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1205891.
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