The Literary Mind

Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind.

Understanding others' mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cogni...

Introducing Books/ The Literary Mind: The Origin of Thought and Language, Sima Rahimi

Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of BRUTUS, a Storytelling Machine

BRUTUS is a p rogram that tells stories. The stories are intriguing, they hold a hint of mystery, a n d n o t least impress ivethey are written in correct English prose. An example (p. 124) is shown in Figure 1. This remarkable feat is g rounded in a complex architecture making use of a number of levels, each of which is parameter ized so as to become a locus of possible variation. The specific...

Literary Evidence for the Cultural Development of a Theory of Mind

The term Theory of Mind is used within the cognitive sciences to refer to the abilities that people have to reason about their own mental states and the mental states of others. An important question is whether these abilities are culturally acquired or innate to our species. This paper outlines the argument that the mental models that serve as the basis for Theory of Mind abilities are the pro...

the implied reader in 18th century literary criticism

this thesis is going to delineate the concept of the reader as implied in 18th century literary theory; based on the study of the major reader oriented elements of criticism of the age-taste, the sublime, and aesthetic pleasure-its aim is to explain what sott of reader is implied and what kind of response on the part of the reader is proposed in 18th century english literary theory and aestheti...