Conceptual Blending in Theatrical Performance

Author(s):  
Kelsey Jacobson

This project will be an examination of the potentialities of using conceptual blending to describe the cognitive processing that occurs when audience members engage in a theatrical event. Specifically, it will frame the processes using the play White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour, which itself examines the multiplicities of mental spaces required to engage in performance. In this project, I hope to examine conceptual blending and its relation to theatre, especially metatheatre, in which audience members must balance several levels of performance and reality in one theatrical event. There has been research conducted into relating blending theories with semantics, semiotics, and literature, in particular in the realm of metaphor in which a reader must maintain both the original and analogy in the same mental space in order to draw the comparison. The move towards theatre follows logically, as it encourages audiences to view a performance of fiction or imagination while balancing the 'real' quality of the actors, set pieces, or even words and story, as in verbatim and documentary performance, respectively. Considering these ideas, my core questions can be grouped around three main ideas: How does conceptual blending function when watching theatrical performance, specifically White Rabbit Red Rabbit? What specific moments in the script, performance, or audience experience in White Rabbit Red Rabbit prompt conceptual blending, or challenge our usual conceptual blending process? What implications are there for the use of conceptual blending or cognitive science in theatre for shaping audience perception?

Author(s):  
Rania A. Hodhod ◽  
Brian S. Magerko

Conceptual blending (CB) is a basic mental operation that plays a fundamental role in the construction of meaning in our everyday life. The core of CB is the partial matching of two input mental spaces and the selective projection from those inputs into a novel 'blended' mental space, which then dynamically develops an emergent structure. Improvisational acting is one specialized domain in which conceptual blending is heavily used; improvisers are required to co-create stories on the stage in real time based on how they continuously perceive their environment. The Digital Improv Project has been engaged in a multi-year study of the cognitive processes involved in improvisational acting and has led to a better understanding of human cognition and creativity. In this article, the authors provide a computational model for the conceptual blending of cognitive scripts that can help digital improv agents to select the two input spaces required in the blending process. The blend is an emergent structure that provides new interesting events that the digital improv agents can adopt in their acting.


2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pheobe Wenyi Sun ◽  
Andrew Hines

Perceived quality of experience for speech listening is influenced by cognitive processing and can affect a listener's comprehension, engagement and responsiveness. Quality of Experience (QoE) is a paradigm used within the media technology community to assess media quality by linking quantifiable media parameters to perceived quality. The established QoE framework provides a general definition of QoE, categories of possible quality influencing factors, and an identified QoE formation pathway. These assist researchers to implement experiments and to evaluate perceived quality for any applications. The QoE formation pathways in the current framework do not attempt to capture cognitive effort effects and the standard experimental assessments of QoE minimize the influence from cognitive processes. The impact of cognitive processes and how they can be captured within the QoE framework have not been systematically studied by the QoE research community. This article reviews research from the fields of audiology and cognitive science regarding how cognitive processes influence the quality of listening experience. The cognitive listening mechanism theories are compared with the QoE formation mechanism in terms of the quality contributing factors, experience formation pathways, and measures for experience. The review prompts a proposal to integrate mechanisms from audiology and cognitive science into the existing QoE framework in order to properly account for cognitive load in speech listening. The article concludes with a discussion regarding how an extended framework could facilitate measurement of QoE in broader and more realistic application scenarios where cognitive effort is a material consideration.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-648
Author(s):  
Kobi Peled

A striking feature of Palestinian oral history projects is the extensive use that interviewees make of direct speech to communicate their memories—especially those born before the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. They do so irrespective of whether or not they participated in or actually heard the dialogues they wish to convey. This article seeks to characterize and explain this phenomenon. In the interviews conducted by the author—an Arabic-speaking Jew—as well as in other projects, this mode of speech is marked by ease of transition from character to character and between different points in time. It clearly gives pleasure to those engaged in the act of remembering, and it grades readily into a theatrical performance in which tone of speech and the quality of the acting become the main thing. This form of discourse sprang up from the soil of a rural oral culture and still flourishes as a prop for supporting memory, a vessel for collecting and disseminating stories, and a technique for expressing identification with significant figures from the past.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 4282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Fernandez-Sanchez ◽  
Alvaro Fernandez-Heredia

The sustainable mobility of the future comes about through sustainable ways of transport, such as walking, cycling, or collective transport. This includes the bus, the underground, and trains in big cities. This article reviews bus-related policies and initiatives worldwide. It also analyses ten cities looking at medium and long-term strategies for the urban bus service. The main ideas are: the forecasts for the use of the urban bus system indicate a significant increase in demand, therefore, there is a need for expanding the offered services; efforts to change the fleets towards Compressed Natural Gas and Electric vehicles; support of technological innovation for communication and accessibility; improving commercial speed and frequencies by infrastructure improvements, operation optimisation and technology; and, the link between these strategies and the air quality of cities. The transition towards a sustainable transport will happen based on the belief that the bus service is no longer the transport of the past or the present, but of the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Jabłońska-Hood

Conceptual integration theory (henceforth CIT), aka conceptual blending, was devised by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) as a model for meaning construction and interpretation. It is based on the notion of a mental space, which originated in Fauconnier's early research (1998). Mental spaces are structures that constitute information pertaining to a particular concept (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 40). Interestingly, mental spaces can be linked together and blended so as to produce a novel quality not previously present. In this manner, conceptual integration serves the purpose of a theoretical model which throws light on creativity in language use. In my paper, I will apply CIT to British humour in order to use its multiway blending together with its dynamic, online running of the blended contents for the purpose of comedy elucidation. It is crucial to observe that British humour is a complex phenomenon which pertains to many different levels of interpretation, i.e. a linguistic, cultural or a discourse one. CIT possesses a well suited cognitive apparatus which can encompass the complexity of British humour with all its layers. The primary goal of the article is to analyse a selected scene from a sitcom entitled Miranda in order to show the validity of the theory in respect of humour studies. In particular, I will undertake to demonstrate that CIT, with a special emphasis on its principles such as compression and the emergent structure of the blend can deal with many processes that accumulate within British humour and result in laughter. Simultaneously, I will try to demonstrate that frame-shifting, as proposed by Coulson (2015: pp. 167-190), can be of help to CIT in humour explanation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Miller-Cotto ◽  
Leann V. Smith ◽  
Andrew David Ribner ◽  
Aubrey H Wang

Executive functions remain one of the most investigated variables in both cognitive science and in education given its high correlation with numerous academic outcomes. Differences in executive function skills between children from higher socioeconomic and lower socioeconomic homes, as well as children from different racial/ethnic backgrounds, are often attributed to the quality of their environment and family resources. The goal of this essay is to highlight commonly held beliefs about executive functions in the field and provide alternative explanations for existing research findings for minoritized children and their families. We provide a summary of the literature on executive functions, how it’s often measured, how it develops, and how we might view research findings differently with greater knowledge of the groups we are studying.


Author(s):  
Victoria Chen

The purpose of this study is to examine whether Multimedia learning theory (Mayer, 1997; Schnotz & Kürschner, 2007) holds true when images are the primary source of information and text information is secondary. I will test how temporal arrangement of audio and image presentations affects quality of learning in this situation. I hypothesize that when audio is played before or after the image participants will require increased cognitive processing to mentally integrate the two sources of information resulting in deeper learning and transfer of learning. On the other hand when audio is played while the image is shown, I hypothesize that participants with high prior knowledge of the subject will score lower than participants with low prior knowledge, because prior knowledge will interfere with knowledge from the two sources causing a redundancy effect. This experiment will lead to greater understanding of multimedia teaching and learning in classrooms as well as how it affects deeper learning.


Author(s):  
Camille Dickson-Deane ◽  
Hsin-Liang (Oliver) Chen

User experience determines the quality of an interaction being used by an actor in order to achieve a specific outcome. The actor can have varying roles and evolving needs, thus reviewing and predicting experiences are important. As an actor uses and gains feedback, the feedback guides individual and group behavior, thus becoming pertinent to how interactions occur. This chapter questions how artefacts are designed to promote such interactions and what processes should be incorporated to ensure successful interpretation, use, (physical) reaction, and conation. This chapter discusses the effects of user experiences today based on societal needs and expectations. It shows how the field is delineated into numerous sub-topics, all of which can stand on their own yet still draw from each other. The discussions will include fields such as cognitive science, human-computer interaction, learning sciences, and even ergonomics to show how design and subsequently interactions can assist in having successful user experiences.


Author(s):  
Camille Dickson-Deane ◽  
Hsin-Liang (Oliver) Chen

User experience determines the quality of an interaction being used by an actor in order to achieve a specific outcome. The actor can have varying roles and evolving needs thus reviewing and predicting experiences are important. As an actor uses and gains feedback, the feedback guides individual and group behavior thus becoming pertinent to how interactions occur. This then questions how artefacts are designed to promote such interactions and what processes should be incorporated to ensure successful interpretation, use, [physical] reaction and conation. This chapter discusses the effects of user experiences today based on societal needs and expectations. It shows how the field is delineated into numerous sub-topics all of which can stand on their own yet, still draw from each other. The discussions will include fields such as cognitive science, human computer interaction, learning sciences and even ergonomics to show how design and subsequently interactions can assist in having successful user experiences


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document