What is it about?
Much of the information people encounter in everyday life is not factual; it originates from fictional sources, such as movies, novels, comic books, and video games, and from direct experience such as pretense, role-playing, and everyday conversation. In this paper, we show (a) that fictionality is a central cognitive theme which any theory of human memory need to account for, (b) how human memory of fictional information is different from other memory phenomena, (c) how memory of fictional information can fit into an existing memory model by extending it, and (d) mechanisms that allow people to separate fact and fiction in memory. By this means, our model can account for explicit and implicit memory of fictional information of events, places, characters, and objects. Further, we propose a set of mechanisms involving various degrees of complexity and levels of conscious processing that mostly keep fact and fiction separated but also allow information from fiction to influence real-world attitudes and beliefs.
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Why is it important?
Fictionality has been given only little attention in research on cognition and memory. We argue that the existing approaches that have been made does not adequately capture the concept of fictionality. It is also important to explain how people can distinguish real from fictional information in memory, by positing explicit memory mechanisms. This distinction is vital for goal-directed behaviour and to act appropriately in the real world. Further, the paper can shed light on misinformation from memory of fictional information, for example, that fictional crime television shows shape people's understanding of the justice system. Another example are in the design of technology, such as social robots, which need to handle fictionality in order to function in human environments where they may be exposed to fictional information.
Perspectives
An interest in human memory in general, and especially in event memory, sparked the idea for the framework in this paper. There is a need to go beyond the traditional idea of episodic memory as defined as memory for events that happened to oneself. People can remember so many other things: events from movies, novels, computer games, and role playing. Memories of these event may be very vivid and share many properties of real autobiographical events. At the same time, people are aware of that these events did not actually happen (in the case of active situations such as computer games and role playing, of course some events took place, but they are about imaginary worlds rather than real ones). A guiding idea was to account for fictionality and memory in a way connected to experimental cognitive psychology and memory research, rather than media/cultural studies or the humanities in general.
Pierre Gander
Goteborgs Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Memory of Fictional Information: A Theoretical Framework, Perspectives on Psychological Science, November 2023, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/17456916231202500.
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