Review on Conscious Process in Reader’s Absorption as a Characteristic Basis of Imaginary Cognition

Abstract

We can imagine anything — not just an object at our hand, but also something we have never seen in our life, such as a dragon, number, heaven, and so on. In this article, we discuss a potential methodology to characterize such imagination as a conscious process, which we cannot sufficiently associate to the corresponding external stimuli. As one of such conscious processes, here we take reading of text, in which the reader construct a rich imaginary world along the storyline from looking at a quite limited visual stimulus, namely just a series of letters on a text. In particular, in the state of absorption, the reader often feels oneself into the imaginary world as a character. By reviewing past research on the absorption in reading, we propose a hypothesis, in which both conscious process itself and something in the conscious experience are objects, that is defined by the consistency between its intention and extension (inductive and deductive way of definition). In this hypothesis, difference between absorption and non-absorption is considered analogously as difference in the point of view of an object in consciousness. On the basis of the prediction of this hypothesis, we discuss empirical tests on our hypothesis.