“Minding the Gap”: Imagination, Creativity and Human Cognition

Pelaprat, Etienne; Cole, Michael

doi:10.1007/s12124-011-9176-5

Cited by 108 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The ability to create mental images (Pelaprat and Cole, 2011) is often considered central to imagination, but the cognitive processes involved do a lot more, such as generating concepts, smells, sounds, stories, processes, emotions (O'Connor and Aardema, 2005) and combinations of these. The brain can not only create places in our mind (e.g., a planet not yet discovered), but it also allows a person to simulate the mental states of fictional characters, experience their emotions such as fear, jealousy or happiness.…”

Section: Cognitive-individual Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future

Milkoreit

2017

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

112

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Climate change places major transformational demands on modern societies. Transformations require the capacity to collectively envision and meaningfully debate realistic and desirable futures. Without such a collective imagination capacity and active deliberation processes, societies lack both the motivation for change and guidance for decision-making in a certain direction of change. Recent arguments that science fiction can play a role in societal transformation processes is not yet supported by theory or empirical evidence. Advancing the argument that fiction can support sustainability transformations, this paper makes four contributions. First, building on the imaginary concept, I introduce and define the idea of socio-climatic imaginaries. Second, I develop a theory of imagination as linked cognitive-social processes that enable the creation of collectively shared visions of future states of the world. This theory addresses the dynamics that bridge imagination processes in the individual mind and collective imagining that informs social and political decision-making. Third, emphasizing the political nature of creating and contesting imaginaries in a society, I introduce the role of power and agency in this theory of collective imagination. I argue that both ideational and structural power concepts are relevant for understanding the potential societal influence of climate fiction. Finally, the paper illuminates these different forms of transformational power and agency with two brief case studies: two climate fiction novels. I contrast a dystopian and utopian science fiction novel -Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth (2015). The two books are very similar in their power/agency profile, but the comparison provides initial insights into the different roles of optimistic and pessimistic future visions.

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Section: Cognitive-individual Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future

Milkoreit

2017

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

112

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“…Drawing on Hume (1896) (see Collier 1999;Furlong 2004), Pelaprat and Cole (2011) have recently proposed to see imagination as "gap-filling" process:…”

Section: Imagination As Loop: Gap Filling or Expansionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, Pelaprat and Cole (2011) propose that "imagination is a process that resolves gaps generated by continuous constraint of past experience, cultural history and phylogeny on the individual so that he or she may produce an image of the world into which they can act and think in the present" (p.405). Born from human's limited capacities to apprehend reality, the rupture is seem as a "gap" which might be temporal, perceptual, informational or conceptual-as such it is a given of our human condition.…”

Section: Imagination As Loop: Gap Filling or Expansionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Curiously, with their recent attempt to consider imagination as implying filling the gap between percepts and concepts, or to complete the always partial and fragmentary vision we have of the world, Pelaprat and Cole (2011) eventually suggest that imagination has as major outcome to allow us to have a better representation of reality. In other words, imagination as such is part of a deficit vision of human intelligence, whose ultimate goal is to better adjust to reality.…”

Section: What Nourishes the Looping Processes?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Imagination as Expansion of Experience

Zittoun

Cerchia

2013

Integr. psych. behav.

118

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This paper proposes a developmental view on imagination: from this perspective, imagination can be seen as triggered by some disrupting event, which generates a disjunction from the person's unfolding experience of the "real" world, and as unfolding as a loop, which eventually comes back to the actual experience. Examining recent and classical theorization of imagination in psychology, the paper opposes a deficitary view of imagination to an expansive notion of imagination. The paper explores Piaget, Vygotsky, Harris and Pelaprat & Cole consider: 1) What does provoke a "rupture" or disjunction? 2) What are the psychological processes involved in the imaginary loop? 3) What nourishes such processes? 4) What are the consequences of such imaginary loop, or what does it enable doing? The paper proposes to adopt an expansive view of imagination, as Vygotsky proposed-a perspective that has been under-explored empirically since his seminal work. To stimulate such sociocultural psychology of imagination, two empirical examples are provided, one showing how children make sense of metaphor in an experimental setting, the other showing a young person using a novel met at school as symbolic resource.Keywords Imagination . Gap filling . Development . Sociocultural research Imagination has been the object of attention since antiquity, and regularly comes to the fore of philosophical or scientific reflection (see Byrne 2005;Crapanzano 2004;Furlong 2004;Murphy et al. 2010;Roth 2007). In this paper we want to synthesize some of the classical contributions to developmental psychology, and show the limits of some of the dichotomies and divisions traditionally raised by the issue. Rather than a chronologic perspective, we propose an analytic one; eventually, approaching the issue from a sociocultural perspective, we sketch an alternative model to apprehend imagination.

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“…Imagination is the main tool for human creativity. It is the characteristic that is most representative of the uniqueness of human mental abilities [233][234][235].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioural Neurology of Personality Disorders: A Bi-dimensional Model

Mansour¹

2017

J Psychiatry

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“Minding the Gap”: Imagination, Creativity and Human Cognition

Cited by 108 publications

References 21 publications

Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future

Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future

Imagination as Expansion of Experience

Behavioural Neurology of Personality Disorders: A Bi-dimensional Model

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