Cognitive and Narrative Attention

The Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities invites you to an online and in-person talk presented by Richard Walsh at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, on 1November 2024 3:00 - 4:30 PM.

We're concerned with narrative and cognition, and with the question of the implicit in narrative and cognition. One promising concept through which to negotiate the interdisciplinary compass of that question, and to interrogate the implicit/explicit distinction, is "attention."

There are contexts for this concept with respect to (temporal) consciousness and to cognitive-perceptual and neurological capacities, which help to identify variables of scope and focus bearing upon attention as a feature of situated cognition. It is also useful to consider narrative as an attentional form of sense-making and communication.

Within narrative theory, attention aligns with questions of perspective and relevance, central concerns in much of narratology. How does this play out if we consider narrative as a mode of cognition? It helps clarify issues with respect to temporality, presents a fundamental challenge to the very idea of “implicit narrative,” and situates the specificity of narrative more precisely with respect to other aspects of cognition—such as awareness, knowledge-how, and the pragmatics of enactive cognition.

It can also usefully bridge between the implicit/explicit issue and adjacent hermeneutic issues of context and inference.

This event will be chaired by Dr Marco Bernini from the Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities.

This event is free to attend.

Zoom details will be circulated closer to the event.