Draft for a chapter of a dissertation in cognitive science by Pierre Gander  (pierre.gander@lucs.lu.se). Preliminary title: “Participating in a story - A cognitive perspective”

CHAPTER 3

Fiction

An aspect of stories not discussed in the preceding chapter is the notion of fictionality. The mental definition of story is neutral with respect to fictionality (as is indeed many external definitions). That is, a story could be fictional as well as non-fictional. (Fiction is not used in this dissertation to denote a type of literature, but is used in its philosophical and cognitive sense.) To further pin down the concept of participatory stories, we need to clarify the role of fiction. This is important because people who experience participatory stories treat them as something that is not real. Participatory stories are fictional.
Fiction is generally held to be a contrast to reality. If something is fictional, it doesn't exist in the real world. Philosophers have been interested in accounting for the nature of fiction. The basic philosophical problem is to explain what kind of things fictional objects are, and how it is possible to talk and think about them when if one claims that they do not exist. 
Some (post-modern) researchers deny that there is a distinction between fiction and reality. For instance, Sørensen (1998), in addressing the question of whether computer games are real or fictional, states that the concept of fiction is a product of modernity and that it is illusionary. The ontological status of fiction aside, doing away with the distinction between fiction and reality in people's understanding of the world is clearly nonsense, because if this was true, it would lead to considerable behavioural effects in people. If people thought that a murder actually took place while watching a thriller movie, or that they themselves actually killed someone while playing a computer game, they would indeed behave very differently from what can now be observed. The distinction between fiction and reality is a crucial element in how people comprehend the world.
The notion of fiction used in this dissertation tries to avoid the philosophical issues and instead focuses on this functional role of fiction.

A MENTAL DEFINITION OF FICTION

Let us look at the definition of fiction for the purposes of this dissertation:

Fiction = def. The content of a mental representation R is fiction to a cognitive system C if and only if C believes that R should not be evaluated in relation to the real world.

A cognitive system is usually a person (but the definition is open for other entities, such as computer systems). That something should not be evaluated here means slightly different things depending on the content of the mental representation. If it is an object or an event (an event can be considered a type of object, as discussed in relation to stories above), the cognitive system attributes non-existence in the real world, that is, the object does not exist or the event did not occur. If it is a proposition, the cognitive system does not attempt to determine the truth value in relation to the real world, for example, if the content of the mental representation is “The tooth fairy works at a bank”.
Thus, fiction here has not the usual ontological meaning of fiction. In other words, we do not attempt to define what the nature of fiction is. Instead, a relativistic notion of fiction is taken, establishing it as a binary predicate involving a cognitive agent and some mental content. This definition of fiction is similar to that of Rapaport and Shapiro (1995) who call it an ontological epistemological notion of fiction to point out that what is concerned is a cognitive agent's understanding of fiction, not fiction as an absolute ontological concept. The same view is adopted by Chafe (1994), studying people’s telling of stories. Making this move avoids much of the difficult ontological discussion about fictionality.
Fictionality is defined as a mode of thought. Something can be considered fictional or not, and the claim is that people know how to do this spontaneously. What is considered fictional or not is determined by pragmatic rules of usage. For instance, the covers of fiction books look systematically different from non-fiction books. Documentaries present content differently from drama. There are also linguistic clues to what should be interpreted as fiction, such as "Once upon a time..." or "Let me tell you a story..." in oral storytelling. Clues such as these and many more aid people to interpret something as fiction or non-fiction. Of course, the division can be blurred so that it is hard to determine if something is fiction or not. And of course, people do sometimes make mistakes, for example, so that they interpret something as non-fiction when it was intended to be fiction (e.g., the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the worlds which made people believe that Martians actually were invading Earth (Bartholomew, 1998)). Still, this is rather the exception than the usual case. The context usually leads people to the intended interpretation. Regardless of occasional misjudgements, there are mechanisms in the human cognitive system which work to keep reality and fiction apart.
Now it is possible to again raise ontological questions. But this time, the questions are about the ability to experience fiction, rather than questions about fiction itself. What is the nature of this ability? One could answer in several ways. From a Darwinist evolutionary perspective, one could ask: How did the ability to experience fiction evolve? Why did it evolve? When in the prehistory of humans did it evolve? Are humans the only animal with this ability? And from a developmental perspective, one could ask when the ability to separate fiction from reality develops in the child. From a pathological perspective, are there disorders where we lose this ability (schizophrenia appears to be one)? Even though these are highly interesting questions to ask, they will not be addressed in this dissertation.
Instead, the ability to experience fiction will be viewed from a functional perspective, which is more relevant with regard to the questions asked in this dissertation. What does it do? How does it affect behaviour? How is the phenomena of narrative understanding affected by that the understander treats some information as fictional? What would happen if the distinction between fiction and non-fiction was not made?

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE ROLE OF FICTION

We will now introduce a number of empirical observations of how fiction relates to cognition. These observations will subsequently be used as points to consider when discussing theories of the cognition of fiction. We argue that any successful theory of cognition of fiction should be able to explain these observations. The first observation is that there is a transfer of background knowledge to the understanding of fiction. The second observation concerns the opposite: transfer of fictional information to background knowledge. The third observation is that there are not necessarily any perceptual or sensorimotor differences between fictional and real events and actions. Finally, the fourth observation is that the distinction between fiction and reality can sometimes be weakened in memory. 

Observation One: Transfer of background knowledge to understanding of fiction

In the understanding of fiction, people use existing background knowledge, including knowledge about cultural, social, and physical matters. For instance, a unicorn can be imagined given knowledge about horses and horns. However, it is not only exotic cases of fiction where the audience needs to provide background knowledge. It comes into every part of understanding fiction. Basic things, such as that “Sherlock Holmes is a human” demands general knowledge about what it means to be human. However, the problem becomes not to use any background knowledge, because then we would hastily conclude that the statement “Sherlock Holmes is a human” is false, since there is no such thing as Sherlock Holmes in the real world.

Observation Two: Transfer of fictional information to background knowledge

A second observation is that the influence of information also may be in the direction from fictional information to general background knowledge about the world. For instance, things about Middle Age France can be learnt by reading a novel about Middle Age France, even though the novel is purely fictional. However, as discussed above, the distinction between fiction and reality is upheld at a general level. They are not treated equally. The question then becomes: When and how does fictional information enter background knowledge?

Observation Three: The absence of perceptual differences 

A third observation concerns the conditions of making an attribution of something as fictional or real. The observation is that there need not be any perceptual or sensorimotorical differences between fictional and real events and actions.
Let us consider how fiction functions when an audience sees a play on stage. When someone is murdered in the story, the audience should recognise it as a murder. If they did not, they would not be able to understand what was going on in the story. But they should not believe that a murder really happened and rush out and call the police. Note that the physical stimuli, that is, the action on stage, might be perceptually indistinguishable from the real thing (a glistening knife, fake blood, etc.). (What matters here is what is perceived, not what happens in any objective sense.) Fiction plays an important role, not only in perception, but in action as well. Let us consider an example of a video game arcade where there is a video game incorporating a gun. The game is played by firing the gun at characters on a video screen. The gun looks and feels very much like a real gun, and is handled in the same way. Now, not only is the performed action on a conceptual level identical to the real world ("shooting someone with a gun"), but the action is also sensorimotorically identical. The sensorimotor activity of holding the fake gun is identical to holding a real gun. The only thing that keeps the player from believing that she actually is shooting real people is a belief that it is not real, but fictional. One could give other examples with even more sensorimotor and physical similarities to the real world, such as when children are engaging in pretence play, or when participants are involved in a live role-playing game for days without interruption. In the same way as in the example with the murder on stage, these are cases where no perceptually noticeable physical differences exist. 

Observation Four: Blurring the distinction of fiction and non-fiction in memory

People are generally good at remembering at a later stage which actions were fictional and which ones were non-fictional. For instance, in the play example they remember that the murder was fictional but that, say, the announcement of a pause was real. In the video gun example, they remember that they didn't actually kill anybody, but they remember if they earned a position on the list of high scores.
Sometimes, however, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction can be obscured, especially as time passes between the event and when it is later remembered. People may in some cases mistakenly believe that a fictional event was real. The distinction between fictional and real events is fallible.

THE COGNITION OF FICTIONALITY

It follows from the above discussion that there must be some difference represented in memory that allow people to separate fiction from reality. How is fictional information represented in the cognitive system? 

Possibilities for cognition of fictionality

There are several logically possible explanations for how people are able to remember which events were fictional and which events were non-fictional. Consider the following alternatives:

(i)	The contents of the events themselves reveal if they are fictional or not (e.g., fictional content is unrealistic or otherwise unique), such as unicorns, monsters, and mountains of gold.
(ii)	Along with the mental representation of each event stored in memory there is some kind of marker which identifies the event as fictional or real. 
(iii)	A similar position is that there is an association from the memory of the event to its source, such as a movie that was watched.
(iv)	The events are mentally represented in memory in conjunction with the context (e.g., time, space, sensorial) in which they occurred, which lets a person deduce at the time of recall if the event occurred in a typical fictional context (as when sitting in a theatre or while reading a book). This position would allow the highest amount of errors separating reality from fiction, since there may sometimes be limited contextual information available, which could lead to a misjudgement.
(v)	A combination of some or all of the above.

We will now look at some theories of the cognition of fiction, and some associated cognitive theories, and relate them to the possible explanations presented above. In surveying the literature, it is clear that the topic of fiction has received very little attention within cognitive psychology and cognitive science in general. For instance, all empirical studies that were found were dated 1989 or later, even though many other aspects of cognition have been studied extensively since the 1950s. The reason for this situation can only be speculated about. Probably, cognition which concerns the organism’s relation to the real world (such as perceiving, remembering, and reasoning about the world) has had precedence in research. Perhaps fiction has been considered to be merely recreational, play, something not useful. Perhaps the topic has been avoided because of its philosophical difficulties.
The following discussion of cognitive theories will involve reality monitoring, compartmentalisation, pretence, and computational modelling of understanding of fiction.

Reality monitoring as a theory of cognition of fiction

A theory which addresses a phenomenon similar to fiction is reality monitoring (Johnson & Raye, 1981). The theory explains how the cognitive system works when separating memories of events that actually happened from events that were merely imagined. According to the theory, there are several types of processes at work, both at an unconscious and conscious level. In part, the content of the memory influences the decision (which corresponds to position 1 in the list above). Mainly, there are processes which evaluate the context, in terms of the presence of spatial, temporal, perceptual, emotional, and other details in the memory (which corresponds with position 4 in the list above). Memories with a higher degree of contextual details are more likely to be attributed to a real event, and memories with a higher degree of mental operations, for example, thinking and reasoning, are more likely to be classified as an imagined event. 
If we can make a parallel between fiction and imagined events, the theory becomes a theory about how people can separate memories of fiction from memories of reality, although the theory does not specifically address the phenomenon of fiction. Returning to the four observations discussed above, we see that the reality monitoring theory is well equipped to handle Observation One, Two, and Four. However, the theory has problems accounting for Observation Three (the absence of perceptual differences). For a priori reasons, such as the video gun and the live-role playing examples above, the theory does not seem to capture the cognitive aspects of fictionality. In general, the temporal, spatial, and perceptual context need not differ between the fictional and the real cases. The application of reality monitoring theory to cognition of participatory stories will be empirically tested in Chapter XXX where qualities of memories from participatory stories are investigated.

Experimental studies of compartmentalisation of fictional information

Potts, St. John, and Kirson (1989) specifically studied representation of fictional information. They used Anderson's ACT* semantic network theory (although they stress that their discussion holds for any memory model), which in part consists of concepts nodes with associative links between nodes. According to Potts et al., fictional information is stored through compartmentalisation, which means that it is stored separate from, not linked to, general world knowledge and instead has links to the fictional story source. Thus, the position proposed by Potts et al. corresponds to number 3 in the list above. Interpreting the theory literally, it cannot account for Observations One, Two, or Four. It is neutral with respect to Observation Three.
Marsh, Meade, and Roediger (2003), building on the work of Potts et al., investigated three hypotheses about the representation of fictional information using a series of experiments: i) Fictional information is completely integrated into the person's world knowledge, or ii) it is completely compartmentalized, or iii) fictional information is represented according to a hybrid model, where fictional information is associated both with world knowledge and its fictional source. Marsh et al. also subscribe to position 3 above. Evidence was found for the hybrid position. Marsh et al.’s theory allows all the four observations (it is neutral with respect to Observation Three), but does not explain any of them. 
There are some features of the method used that makes generalisation to authentic contexts difficult. Marsh et al., as well as Potts et al., used artificial texts and did not study reading for pleasure. The participants in the experiments most probably anticipated subsequent memory tests, which would affect how they monitor their reading and how much time is spent on rehearsal. This could potentially make the situation very different from a situation where they read for pleasure. Generalising to more authentic reading situations should be done very carefully. Another problem still remaining is that despite clear experimental results, it is not known why associations are sometimes formed more strongly to world knowledge and sometimes more strongly to the fictional source. There is also very little known about details of the actual representations (Marsh et al., 2003).

A cognitive theory of pretence

On a slightly different but related issue, Nichols and Stich (2000) proposed a theory of how beliefs are represented mentally when a person engages in pretence. Although pretence and fiction may appear to be two different things, they are closely related. A fiction is something that does not exist in the real world, but in the mind, such as "this banana is a telephone", or "there exists a world in which I am king". This is exactly what pretence is. Nichols and Stich's theory is presented at a rather coarse level of detail and they simply assume that there is a "pretence box", just as there are "belief" and a "desire" boxes, in which propositions can be put. Thus, they hold position 2 from the list above. A problem in this approach is that if the cognitive system generates inferences from beliefs both in the "pretence box" and "belief box", contradictions and false conclusions easily arise. For instance, although we pretend that a banana is a telephone, we should not make the inference that the banana could be used to call an ambulance in a real emergency. The possible contradictions that could arise when inferences are drawn from both the "real world" and the "pretence world" (such as "this banana is a telephone") are handled in the theory by a filtering mechanism, which is not further specified. Nichols and Stich (2000) confess that very little is known about how inferences are filtered, but they note that there is empirical evidence that it works. Thus, Observations One, Two, and Four is acknowledged, but not explained, by the theory. It is neutral regarding Observation Three.

A computational model of understanding of fiction

However, there has been at least one preliminary proposal on the details of representation and inferences of fictional information. Rapaport and Shapiro (1995) implemented a computational model of a story understanding agent, Cassie, based on the SNePS semantic network belief representational and reasoning system. The agent read a fictional story and could use world knowledge in understanding the fictional content, and the fictional content could in some cases become integrated with world knowledge. As a fictional story is read, Cassie sets up a story space by linking the contents of the story to a story operator. The story space is formally equivalent to Cassie’s other belief spaces, such as representing “Mary believes that John is a boy”. Two rules are used to control migration of facts and inferences inside and outside of the story context. Related to Observation One is that propositions from outside the story context are assumed to hold when necessary for understanding the story and could be withdrawn at a later stage according to Cassie’s belief revision system. Similarly, related to Observation Two is that propositions from within the story are assumed to hold outside the story context when necessary for understanding the real world, and these propositions can in the same way be withdrawn at a later stage. One way of seeing it is that Rapaport and Shapiro (1995) add detail to what Nichols and Stich (2000) call the filtering mechanism. However, Rapaport and Shapiro note that their work is preliminary and needs further implementation. The theory is consistent with Observation Three. Although the theory does not address Observation Four, it does provide a mechanism with allows the distinction between fictional and real events to change.

In summary, the cognitive process of comprehending fiction is not well understood. Out of research on reality monitoring, pretence, and representation of fictional information in memory, the most promising attempt appears to be the computational approach of Rapaport and Shapiro (1995) which represents a story in a story context by linking the story facts to a story operator and give some suggestions to how information can both come from world background knowledge into story understanding, and transfer from stories to world knowledge. However, as can be seen from their approach, people’s performance of handling fiction presents a complex computational problem.
Giving an account of fiction is important because people treat participatory stories as fictive. Instead of providing an ontological characterisation of fiction, we here approached fiction as something considered by a cognitive system as not relating to the real world. Distinguishing fiction from reality is by no means an immaculate process, but it works most of the time, as people’s behaviour show. Compared to traditional stories, fiction takes on additional importance when we turn to participatory stories, because these not only represent but also invites to action in a fictional world.
With cognitive notions of stories and fiction, we have now laid the foundation for a cognitive approach to participatory stories, to which we will turn in the next chapter.