Fictional Cognition
My primary research interest is children's and adults'
understanding and appreciation of fiction. What kinds of cognitive skills are necessary for
understanding and creating a fictional representation? What is the nature of these representations of fictional entities and events? What happens in the mind
of an author creating a story, in the mind of a reader reconstructing
the author's vision, and in the mind of a child playing a game of make-believe?
I am currently investigating how children and adults structure the fictional worlds with which they interact. My past research has found that both adults and
five year-old children make sharp divisions, not only between reality and fiction, but also between multiple fictional worlds: Batman believes that SpongeBob SquarePants is fictional, just as we do. This structure also holds for children's pretend play games, suggesting that the same underlying cognitive mechanism is responsible for both types of fictional representations. Ongoing research investigates whether this multiple-world structure also holds for counterfactual worlds, or whether it is only found in richly structured, narrative-based worlds.
Another current project aims to discover what children and adults believe about the content of the fictional worlds they create. Are these worlds really as
different from reality as they appear, or is there some continuity
between reality and fiction? What aspects of reality remain true in fiction, and what aspects of a fictional world can be fruitfully expored to reality?
I am also interested in how the capacity to create and understand
fiction is related to other cognitive capacities. I see particular affinity between the abilities to understand stories and pretend play and the abilities to plan for the future and reason counterfactually --- all of these skills require, at base, the ability to reason about a representation of events that do not reflect reality. In addition, my research aims to find links between fictional cognition and other cognitive skills that require representation, including theory of mind reasoning and memory.
Popular press coverage of this project:
Scientific American: Mind, June/July 2006
Wondertime, forthcoming
Moral Development
A second line of work investigates how toddlers, preschool-age children, and children with autism learn about the moral rules that govern our social interactions. I am specifically interested in discovering what role emotions play in children's moral judgment.
The Psychology of Scientific Explanations
A third research interest deals with the nature
of scientific explanation and understanding. In particular, my research asks whether people find certain types of explanation easier to understand or more explanatory than others.
One current project explores these issues using explanations
for psychological phenomena as a test case. I found that people find explanations of psychological phenomena more satisfying when these explanations contain neuroscience verbiage, even when this verbiage is irrelevant to the logic of the explanation. Future studies will examine the reasons for this effect and will broaden the investigation to include other special sciences.
Popular press coverage of this project:
The New Yorker, July 2, 2007
The New York Times Magazine, December 9, 2007
The Guardian, February 16, 2008
The Boston Globe, August 17, 2008
For more information on these projects, email me
at
deenasw (at) ruccs.rutgers.edu
last updated July 2008 |
