https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1890-8319
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Some stories generate in us a peculiar experience of intense narrative engagement. This common experience, which we call narrative immersion, has been the object of a vast literature in psychology and other disciplines. Philosophers, however, have only recently engaged with this topic and the tendency has been to explain it by postulating specific kinds of mental states. We propose a different approach, explaining narrative immersion by means of a particular distribution of attention over the content of ordinary mental states. First, we provide a characterization of narrative immersion based on studies by psychologists and other theorists. Then, we discuss alternative views and develop our own proposal. We articulate how attention works as we engage with the narrative, and how the adequate distribution of attention over the mental states involved in understanding the storyworld can offer the resources to explain the characteristic features of narrative immersion. Unlike alternative proposals, ours avoids the need to postulate controversial mental states.
Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at various venues, including the Fribourg Workshop on Imagination andFiction, the IIFs Research Seminar (UNAM), the VLC Philosophy Lab, and the University of Bayreuth. We are grateful for the comments received by participants of these gatherings. Special thanks to Stacie Friend for providing thorough feedback on initial versions. Both co-authors are immensely grateful to each other for the remarkable journey of collaborating on this paper, particularly given that the idea originated just in the aftermath of the 2017 earthquake in Mexico City.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 As conceived by Csikszentmihályi, flow is a much broader experience involving not only our engagement with narratives but a more general experience of what it is to be deeply absorbed in almost any activity.
2 For an overview, see Bilandzic and Busselle (Citation2017).
3 Green (Citation2004) gives a specific meaning to the idea of transportation which, for her, is a label that characterizes the whole phenomenon. Here we use the term in the non-committal metaphorical sense explained in this section.
4 This term, as we use it here, should be distinguished from a film stylistic technique that Carroll (Citation1985) also calls bracketing.
5 A quick search on Reddit yields plenty of testimonials in this direction.
6 This is consistent with people also responding emotionally to characters in the absence of immersion (Tal-Or and Cohen Citation2010).
7 A similar point is raised by (Liao, Citationn.d.).
8 In other respects, however, immersion in film, literature and theater might be more complex. One could claim, for instance, that this type of immersion is developmentally more advanced, since child’s games of make believe precede narratives that play out more narrowly within the mind.
9 Depending on the phenomenon, one term or another might seem more suitable. For psychological mechanisms, it seems more appropriate to talk in terms of ‘underlying’, whereas when the mechanism is a causal sequence with some final product, ‘production’ is better suited. These ways of talking can often be inter-translated as in ‘the product is produced’ and ‘the production has an underlying mechanism’ (Craver and Tabery Citation2019). In this paper we will talk in terms of the mechanism underlying narrative immersion and producing and maintaining its characteristic features.
10 For a detailed characterization of mechanisms and discussion of mechanistic explanations in science see Craver and Tabery (Citation2019), Glennan (Citation2002) Machamer, Darden, and Craver (Citation2000). For discussion of the role of mechanistic explanations in cognitive science see Bechtel Citation2008; Piccinini and Craver Citation2011.
11 For different understandings of causation in mechanistic explanations see Salmon (Citation1984), Glennan (Citation2009) or Woodward (Citation2003).
12 This introduces a methodological complication. Since most philosophical accounts do not characterize the phenomenon they are trying to explain, it is not clear that their target is the same phenomenon psychologists and other theorists have described and which we are concerned with here. However, these accounts explicitly use the labels of ‘immersion’ and ‘transportation’ when they describe (part of) their object of study and some of the examples they give suggest that they are indeed concerned with at least a very similar phenomenon.
13 As we mentioned in the introduction, appeal to attention as an explanation of narrative immersion is not entirely new (e.g. Green and Donahue Citation2009; Kampa Citation2018; Liao and Doggett Citation2014; Liao, Citationn.d.; Smith Citation2018; Todd, Citation2012). Unlike those proposals, we articulate a specific attentional mechanism that produces, underlies and maintains the characteristic features of narrative immersion.
14 Carrasco and colleagues have shown that attention alters the appearance of objects in any given environment; for example, attention increases the apparent flickering rate of an attended flickering stimulus (Carrasco Citation2011). In this case, one would be more prone to judge that the flickering rate of the stimulus is higher.
15 For a recent discussion of attention based on semantic features see Stokes Citation2018.
16 Some have maintained that the object of attention is intentional even in visual attention, given that we can attend to the features of hallucinated objects (for discussion see Wu Citation2014).
17 The deployment of attention sometimes depends upon our conceptual capacities – paradigmatic examples that illustrate this effect are the Stroop effect (Stroop Citation1935) and the attentional blink (Shapiro, Raymond, and Amrnell Citation1994), where the blink effect is sometimes determined by the semantic properties of the stimulus (e.g. Schwabe and Wolf Citation2010).
18 The notion of storyworld is similar to the notion of ‘fictional world’ – or what is fictionally true – but it is neutral with respect to whether the story is fictional or non-fictional. Notice that, what is the case according to the story in a non-fictional work is not always what is actually the case in the world. As Friend notes ‘the most hardened atheist recognizes that, according to Augustine’s Confessions, God exists’ (Friend Citation2017b, 31).
19 According to Friend, for example, this requires forming mental or situation models, i.e. coherent and multidimensional mental representation of the situations presented in the work (Citation2017a; Citation2017b).
20 This is because they are not, conceptually, part of the storyworld, but also, because either we are not preoccupied with reflecting on the stylistic devices or because the content and the form are very well integrated.
21 In the representationalist framework that we are assuming, one occurrently believes that such-and-such is the case only if one has a representational state with such a content. There is another sense, a dispositional one, in which you probably believe all the time that five plus four is nine or that the current president has less than one hundred siblings. However, you probably did not have an occurrent representation with such content before reading this footnote; i.e. they were not occurrent beliefs but rather dispositional ones (Schwitzgebel Citation2015). One might cease to have an occurrent representation with the content I should make an appointment with the doctor while, at the same time, continue to believe (dispositionally) the same content.
22 Note that this action is neutral regarding whether there can be awareness in the absence of attention. For discussion of the relation between awareness and attention see for example Koch and Tsuchiya (Citation2007), Wu (Citation2014).
23 Different theories of attention will adopt distinct approaches to comprehending the details of the mechanisms that underlie the particular selectivity discussed in this section. For instance, some theories may focus on how the coherent course of action in understanding the story is maintained (Wu, Citation2014), while others might focus on how to relate the questions encoding the conditions for the story to be understood and what counts as an answer to them (Koralus Citation2014). Some theories may investigate the allocation of limited cognitive resources to understand the story (Broadbent Citation1958), while others may consider the priority given to understanding the story in comparison to other tasks (Watzl Citation2017). It’s important to note that our proposal remains neutral regarding these various theoretical approaches.
24 The use of a ‘that’ clause to express the content of a mental state is not intended to entail a discursive or language – like structure – if a map is an example of a pictorial, as opposed to discursive, representation, the expression ‘the map represent that Mexico City is south of California’ to express part of its content seems perfectly felicitous. For example, in the case of perceptual states we might need to read the ‘that’ clause as allowing for non-conceptual content (Toribio Citation2007; Siegel Citation2021). See also Stanley (Citation2011) for discussion of the relation between know-that and know-how, -what, -which, etc.
25 This doesn’t mean that audiences consciously disregard stylistic devices or that these are easily abstractable from other parts of the narrative content. Sometimes the choice of certain stylistic devices contributes to fully direct our attention to the storyworld because they are well-integrated – as is the case in classic narrative films, which favor ‘transparent narration’; other times, they call attention to themselves and might be distracting – think about Brechtian techniques, or blatant editing continuity mistakes.
26 How attention is sustained is a further issue: it can be due to the type and use of some stylistic devices that help us process the narrative more fluently, to the skillful design of the structure of the narrative, to our personal interest in the content of the story, to the specific conditions in which we are exposed to the narrative, etc.
27 Interestingly, some independently motivated theories of attention seem to straightforwardly accommodate Carroll’s view. According to Koralus’ theory of attention, for instance, the functional role of attention is a matter of the relationship between questions encoding the completion conditions for a task and what counts as answers to those questions (Koralus Citation2014). We are grateful to an anonymous referee who has brought this matter to our notice.
28 Unlike Schellenberg, we do not claim that we are immersed only if our mental states come to resemble beliefs in the reality of the things we imagine. Certain attentional patterns might make parts of the content of our mental state particularly salient and, as a result, we might end up believing what goes on in the story – or some logical implications of the story events. However, this is a possible outcome of the immersive state, not a requirement for it.
29 This representation in terms of a belief including the ‘in the narrative’ operator is only an abstraction of a more complex state. The way in which attention shapes what we perceive and other mental states we maintain as well as the distribution of attention over their content are also part of the mechanism that we claim underlies narrative immersion.
30 Film and literary theorists are probably in a better position than philosophers to describe these techniques. For some philosophical work on film techniques to capture and guide attention see Carroll Citation1985; Citation2003; Citation2019.