Research in psychology has suggested that reading fiction can improve individuals' social-cognitive abilities. Findings from neuroscience show that reading and social cognition both recruit the default network, a network which is known to support our capacity to simulate hypothetical scenes, spaces and mental states. The current research tests the hypothesis that fiction reading enhances social...

This article introduces user experience research that has been carried out by evaluating a video-illustrated science fiction prototype with process control workers. Essentially, the prototype ‘A remote operator’s day in a future control center in 2025’ was aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and ambient intelligence for the factories of the future. The theoretical obj...

A considerable part of our lives is spent engaging in the entertaining worlds of fiction that are accessible through media such as books and television. Little is known, however, about how we are able to readily understand that fictional events are distinct from those occurring within our real world. The present functional imaging study explored the brain correlates underlying such abilities by...

Skull can be interpreted as an investigation by PD James into the way a classical detective character, stereotypes, crime and setting would be affected by the introduction of modern-world issues and values. Essentially she has placed the manor-house setting within contemporary Britain, and migrated its inhabitants to Courcy Castle as a controlled experiment in sociology. In this way, James succ...

This is an account of theoretical issues which came out, almost unbidden, from a practical test of the following hypothesis: that the natural language in which to write interactive fiction is natural language. IF is a form of creative writing impossible before the development of computing, but whose 30-year history has seen a f lourishing of experimentation if not mainstream acceptance (except ...

The current paradigm for synthetic reality based interactive fiction features familiar kinds of worlds realistically presented. This approach is unsatisfying in that it excludes several interesting classes of worlds, such as worlds where the user experiences the subjective reality of a character with a substantially different personality. We wish to extend the current paradigm to include classe...