Exploring Immersion in Fiction: How Writers and Readers Experience Imaginary Worlds — A Research Proposal

Research Proposal
Written By Gevher Karboga

We consume all sorts of media daily as readers, watchers, and listeners. We also produce media through writing, drawing, and recording. Genres help organise this vast array of work into smaller categories, enabling certain groups of people to enjoy specific types of content. For my research proposal, the genre I want to focus on is fiction. Although the methods I mention could also be applied to non-fiction, my primary interest lies in understanding how writers build immersive fictional worlds and characters. The main question this research proposal seeks to answer is whether the way a fictional story is written affects the level of immersion experienced by readers compared to writers. My hypothesis is that in some cases, the writer of a story may feel a much stronger connection to the source material than the readers, resulting in readers not having as transportive of an experience. This idea also extends to different readers—while one reader may become deeply absorbed in a narrative, another might struggle to connect with it. To explore this hypothesis, several questions must be addressed: How do we facilitate immersiveness? Does being familiar with the culture or the geography in a story affect immersion? How do our belief systems and morals affect our experience as a reader? Lastly, how does the relationship between a writer and their characters differ from the relationship between a reader and those same characters?

Immersiveness can be related to a lot of things. Margaret Mackey’s study in 2019 shows that people integrate their own environment and childhood locations into their mental imagery while reading books. Mackey used a very diverse group of participants for this study (ranging from different ages, races, and cultures) and found that childhood environment has a significant effect on these participants no matter their background. To observe the effect of the integration of episodic memory with less independent variables, they also looked at two participants who had very similar socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Since these two participants had similar backgrounds, they were able to focus on how the dependent variable (in this case, the effect of memories) manifested in their imaginations when they were reading books. The incorporation of the actual word-for-word descriptions written in the books varied between the two participants; however, both of them showed significant levels of realism blended with the descriptions in the fantasy books they have read as children (Mackey, 2019). Both were asked what they pictured in their heads when they were reading the location descriptions in a fantasy book (they were also asked to talk about separate books they remember to have been their favourites) and both of their answers contained fragments of spaces from their childhood like their backyard or the forest near their house. One of the participants also stated that he associated the feeling he got from going down a slope with his bike as a kid to the action scenes in stories. This may potentially imply that readers who have no exemplar in their memory that is similar to the settings that are being described in a fictional story might have a harder time being immersed in the world.

By looking into the “cognition of the impossible”, we can have a clearer idea on how certain levels of awareness are achieved. Fiction has no boundaries, so a story can be ecologically valid or completely unexpected. Some readers can have difficulty getting immersed in a world that throws them curve-balls one after another, thus making them constantly aware that they are reading a work of fiction. Incorporation of real life rules and regulations in a fictional world may potentially make the reality-transition process smoother. These bits and pieces from the real world can lead a reader to perceive a non-existent fictional world as valid as the world we live in (Rebora, 2016). This goes in tandem with Tolkien’s idea of a fantasy writer being a “sub-creator” who makes a Secondary World with its own rules and regulations that make sense when the reader enters that world (Tolkien, 2006). However, in order for this to work without a hitch, everything in the Secondary World, from its characters to its history and landscape, needs to be coherent and compatible with each other. Moreover, it all ties back to the genre selection that was previously mentioned. Since it’s easier to go to the extremes in fantasy, I will propose to analyse fantastical narrations and worlds.

Alternatively, Vera Nünning talks about the effect of the narrative on our beliefs (Nünning, 2015) where certain conventions may result in heightening readers’ ability to shift perspectives and look at things from a character’s point of view, and suspend disbelief as well as belief. When the readers are aware of the fact that what they are reading is fiction, the solid line that divides what is morally right or wrong gets blurry. As much as our pre-existing experiences shape our ability to become immersed in fiction, fiction also opens us up to things outside of our experiences. The things we consider horrific in actuality may not have as strong of an effect on us when we are sitting on a sofa looking at a page. This allows the reader’s belief system regarding ethics and morals to become more flexible and open to new scenarios that otherwise wouldn’t be entertained. This, in turn, prompts us to look at immersion from a non-ecologically-valid perspective. If we were to bend the rules that shape the foundation of morality in the real world, it would cause chaos. However, when the writer does that in a setting where the reader is aware of the fact that the fictional world is not interacting with the real world, immersion is facilitated. Thus, there is no set way when it comes to ecological validity in terms of how a fictional world governs itself as long as there’s coherence.

There are a lot of aspects in reading and writing fiction that play to our cognitive processes like episodic memory, long-term memory, visual cortex, and even our belief system. Most of the previous studies (Mackey 2019, Taber 2017, Foxwell 2020) look at fiction perception from either a reader’s perspective or a writer’s. Although there are studies on how reading affects writing and vice versa, I have not come across a study that clearly compares the level of immersiveness of a piece of fiction from both the reader and the writer’s perspective. The aspects I want to further explore are the incorporation of realism (e.g. real bits of history in fantasy or real technology in sci-fi), their effect on the immersion, and the level of detail (sensory or contextually) in the narration. I want to analyse how these affect readers’ attention. Thus, I propose comparing the production and consumption of different mediums.

The role of suspension of disbelief, Secondary Worlds, empathy and perspective shifts in reading also exists when we watch a movie or listen to a fictional podcast. We also know that some people prefer movies to books and vice versa. Previous research shows what parts of our brain get activated while watching videos or movies (Hamzelou, 2016). So it might be possible to do a bunch of fMRI scans and subtract out the sources of activation to see if the presented format of fiction has an effect on us as readers (or watchers as well). If we manage to obtain a clear answer to this, it could also help make fiction in the written format more immersive for people who prefer visuals to words. Of course, a study like this has limitations and we would have to design the variables and stimuli very carefully to be able to come to a conclusion (similar to that of the VWFA word, scrambled word, object, scrambled object paradigm). Following these studies, I will be proposing further experiments for the questions that were previously posed in this paper.

Does being familiar with the culture or the geography in a story affect immersion?

To answer this question, I propose an experiment where we look at reading as a spatial exercise. To encourage thinking of literature geographically, we select participants from different geographical locations and cultures.

Procedure:

Two participants from very different locations could potentially help us illustrate the difference in the perception of imaginary worlds. For example, let’s imagine a pair where one participant is from Iceland and the other from Morocco (these locations can be different, it is to illustrate the visual difference in geography) and ask them to create a map similar to what Mackey did in her study. In Mackey’s study, one of the two participants created a fictional map by making a collage of photos taken from the childhood location he imagined while reading the scenes. (Mackey, 2019) We can have two phases to this experiment: firstly asking both of the participants to create a map for the same scene description in a work of fiction, and secondly asking them to create maps for a scene that’s rooted in each other’s cultures.

The first phase will show us how different their maps are for the same source material. This, in turn, can help us infer how much of their episodic memory and how much of the original description of the scene they incorporate into the location when they imagine it.

For the second phase, they will be presented with separate scenes where one will have descriptions closer to what the participant from the first place can picture; and similarly, the other will have something that resembles the environment of the second participant. After presenting these scenes to the participants, we can compare how easy it was to be immersed in it by asking them some introspective questions (e.g. “Have you ever seen something like this before?”, “Did you have a clear image in your head when you read this?” or “Which scene was easier to picture / more immersive?”). The results of this experiment might help us understand how much our own experiences affect us as readers.

How do our belief systems and morals affect our experience as a reader?

The study I propose for this question is fairly short and simple.

Procedure:

We will be asking questions to readers about their core values (ethical, moral) in life that they feel comfortable sharing (Zaidi, 2019). Then we will present them with different pieces of fictional worlds and their laws and regulations, and ask them to rate how appealing the narratives are. This entire process will be carried out verbally and we will record their answers.

This ties into Nünning’s idea of heightening empathy and perspective switching with writing. The rationale for this experiment is that it may potentially give us an idea about how easy it is for readers to look at the events in the story from the point of view of the main character if their beliefs align. This also brings up another interesting question: is it actually more immersive when the readers resonate with the characters or vice versa? Nünning suggests that our belief system affects the way we empathise with fictional characters; however, it also talks about the evaporation of the strict moral code we follow.

Do different media formats play a part in immersion?

This question is pretty tricky to answer which makes proposing a further study tricky as well. However, I propose to follow a similar format to the Visual Word Form Area experiment where we present participants with stimuli and perform a subtraction depending on the activation pattern and area.

Procedure:

For a possible further research regarding my idea of comparing fictional works in different mediums is to take a scene from a fantasy film that clearly sets the scene for the whole film and the script belonging to that scene with the visual cues written in parentheses and compare brain activation patterns with an fMRI. These scenes should introduce the world to the reader. The difference in the results will help as get an idea on which areas get activated when watching a scene versus reading the same scene.

Then we can present the participant with a piece of writing that is not related to fantasy at all (e.g. a page of non-fiction) and compare that with the area that lit up when they read the script. If there is a difference between the script and the non-fiction, this may imply that genres activate different regions.

Afterward, we can introduce an independent variable which could be related to the amount of sensory detail provided in the writing. For example, do we see any changes in the activation areas when we get rid of the visual cues in parentheses in the fantasy script? If so, is the result closer to that of the non-fiction? In this scenario, the dependent variable would be how close the lit-up brain areas are to the visual stimulus that was the movie scene compared to how close it is to the non-fiction. That way we might be able to see if visual cortex or vivid imagination is at play in the immersiveness, and whether or not an experienced writer is more visually inclined than an average reader.

How does the relationship between a writer and their characters differ from the relationship between a reader and those same characters?

I also want to compare how immersed the writers are in their worlds as opposed to their readers. There have been studies that show that certain writers tend to get affected by the illusion of independent agency which enables them to think that their characters are their own agents and will respond when the writers interact with them in their heads (Foxwell et al., 2020). This might also support the idea that the writer of a story may be more immersed due to the symbiotic relationship they create with their characters whereas a reader may not be able to since they don’t have the same quasi-perceptual experience.

Procedure:

A volunteer writer can do the little exercises on the Gotham Writers workshop, and we make participants judge the immersiveness and the quickness of suspension of disbelief of each piece of writing. There could be a reaction time measurement within-participants for varying degrees of realism being incorporated or details being introduced in each layer (layer as in surroundings, sensory detail, supporting characters, etc.).

As for the writer’s perspective, we could ask them to stop writing after being done with the world-building, and visualise a scene where a random character walks around and interacts with the world. Then ask the participants who were the “readers” to imagine the same scene and look at the results using an fMRI to compare both sides. This could be done for several exercises over time.

We could also ask introspective questions that go along with the fMRI observation to try to get a clearer picture of what exactly is going on in the perception of different readers and the writer. These may include questions like, “Did you picture a scene in your head? If so, can you walk us through your mental image?” or “Were you confused about a specific interaction?” for the readers, and something that resembles the survey Foxwell, Alderson-Day, Fernyhough, and Woods did for the writer (Foxwell et al., 2020). In their survey, they had multiple sections that dealt with different aspects of the writers’ lives. The first section had questions like “Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?”, “Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?”, and the second part asked about whether or not they had imaginary friends growing up. The writers answered yes or no, and asked to elaborate depending on how they answered the preceding question.

All of the studies I proposed above require serious commitment since they all would take a relatively long time and multiple sessions to complete. This is one of the difficulties and it depends on the willingness of the subjects. Another limitation would be the frequency of fMRI usage. It could be daunting for people to frequently be tested with the fMRI. This, again, boils down to the willingness of the participants. What I’d aim to achieve with this research is to have a clearer understanding about the relationship of the readers’ personal beliefs and their ease of crossing over to the Secondary World as well as the effect of the coherency of the writer’s style (on the layer exercise) on the readers’ visualisation of the fictional world. Are they immersed? Did the writer manage to convey their vision to other people? The motivation behind researching the cognition of both readers and writers is crucial in understanding how fiction writers can create more engaging stories for their readers. If we have a clearer idea on how any of these processes work, it has the potential to make the experience more enjoyable for both parties.

Bibliography

Gevher Karboga
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