Bridging the gap: from cognitive sciences

and traditional media to new media

Elena Pasquinelli

Institut Jean Nicod

Illusion of reality•Necessary?•Possible?•Ethical?•Alternatives?

Attempt to make users believe that there is no medium and that fictional contents are real

Do we need to believe?

• How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina without believing in the existence of Anna Karenina? [Radford, 1975]

1. We are moved only in presence of existence beliefs about someone (take it for real)

2. We have no existence beliefs about Anna Karenina (we do not take her for real)

3. But we are moved

– A paradoxical reaction

There is no need to believe

1. We can be moved by imaginings and thoughts [Walton, 1978; Currie, 1990; Carroll, 1990]

3. We are not moved in the same way by reality [Radford, 1975, Walton, 1978; Currie, 1990, Carroll, 1990; Stoffregen, 1997]

It’s just a matter of imagination

• Imagine = simulate beliefs [Currie, 1995] = beliefs run off line– Perceptual stimuli

(images, sounds) are props for imagination

– Relations between beliefs are maintained

– Certain behavioral responses are disconnected Neural counterparts of simulation:

Mirror neurons [Rizzolatti, et al., 1996; Gallese & Goldman, 1998]

We are aware of the context

• Context:• fiction• presence of a medium• characteristics of the medium

• We are not surprised if we cannot see characters of radio dramas

• Or interact with movies characters

We are perceptually informed• Both factual and perspectival

contents are affected by the presence of a medium [Noe, 2003]– The perception of the world

varies with the state of the world = factual content of perception

– The aspect of the world varies with our actions = perspectival contents of perception

• The global array is differently specified by a parcel of the world and a medium (Stoffregen & Bardy, 2001; Stoffregen 1997; Stoffregen et al., 2003)– Changes of position of the

perceiver give rise to different optical changes when seeing a real baseball game or a film of a baseball game

We are cognitively aware

• We have learnt what a representation is and how to use it

• We are reminded of it through titles, jingles, utterances:

Once upon a time…

[Bordwell, 1985]

We are cognitively active

– We reconstruct partial events

– We anticipate the future and imagine the past

– We use knowledge acquired in the experience with fiction

[Bordwell, 1985]

Would it be ethical to make us believe?

• “we interrupt this program” • Hoax is severely prevented by communication media codes of ethics

• Jingles, titles, introductions frame fiction, news, commercials in traditional media

• No such contextual references exist in worlds like Second Life

Local illusions

• Proprioceptive illusions:

• Mirror illusions• Fake hand illusions• Vection

ground the sensation of being there or of moving there

Believability

“When Walt asked for realism, he wanted a caricature of realism. One artist analyzed it correctly when he said, “I don’t think he meant “realism”. I think he meant something that was more convincing, that made a bigger contact with people, and he just said “realism” because

“real” things do.” [Thomas & Johnston, 1984]