Pub: Two Essays in Cognitive Criticism.

(The first essay below has excited much discussion recently on the Narrative-L email list.) Zacks, Jeffrey, et al. "Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences." Psychological Science (forthcoming).

Abstract: To understand and remember stories, readers integrate their knowledge of the world with information in the text. Here we present functional neuroimaging evidence that neural systems track changes in the situation described by a story. Different brain regions track different aspects of a story, such as a character’s physical location or current goals. Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities. These results support the view that readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change. (download the paper here: http://dcl.wustl.edu/PDFs/SpeerInPress.pdf)

Zacks, Jeffrey, et al. "Film, Narrative, and Cognitive Neuroscience." Art and the Senses, ed. D. P. Melcher and F. Bacci. New York: OUP, forthcoming.

Abstract: Comprehending a film is an amazing feat of neural and cognitive processing. A series of still pictures are projected quickly on a screen, accompanied by a stream of sound—and a viewer has an experience that can be as engaging, emotionally affecting, and memorable as many experiences in real life. Comprehending film is all the more amazing when one considers how films are constructed. Films typically are comprised of hundreds and into the thousands of individual camera shot, which are continuous runs of the camera. Shot are edited together in such a way to create scenes, which are sequences of goal-directed actions or unintentional events that take place in a particular location (or one or two locations when events are depicted as occurring concurrently). Shots on average last only a few seconds and are edited together in such a way that the vast majority of them go unnoticed by the viewer. (download the paper here: http://dcl.wustl.edu/PDFs/ZacksMaglianoInPress.pdf)