• Date & Time: Friday, January 17th, 2025, 5:00 - 7:00 pm (JST, UTC+9)
• Venue: Online (via Zoom Meeting)
• Registration: https://u-tokyo-ac-jp.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMof-2rrDsjHNPNxwfubPROSdlVnugNGHAh
• Speaker:
  Emanuele Castano（University of Florence, The Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies,  National Research Council (Italy) ）
• Chaired by: Suzuki Atsunobu（The University of Tokyo）
• Language: English
• Host: The University of Tokyo Humanities Center

Abstract

Storytelling played a crucial role in human evolution. To this day, through stories we humans gain declarative and proceduralknowledge, learn the skills that support learning itself, and develop our social cognition architecture. Over the past decade, I haveconducted research to better understand how stories help us develop such architecture, and thus influence the way we perceive and navigate the social world. The main tenet of this research is that stories are not all the same: in addition to their subject matter, stories vary in how they depict characters and their relations, on how the plot develops, and on the language they use. Merging insights from cognitive science, philosophical inquiry, and literary studies, I have thus proposed that the literary versus popular fiction distinction captures some of these important differences, and thus that reading primarily literary or popular fiction results indifferent social skills, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. In this seminar, I will present my theoretical model as well as results of studies conducted using a variety of methods, ranging from human experimentation, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence, which provide substantial support to my theoretical proposition.