Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-129).

Thesis (M.A.R.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66 [i.e. 65]-67).

As articulated by J. K. Wright (1947), "terrae incognitae," or unknown lands, capture the imagination and inspire an excitement to explore and learn, but with a reduction in travel times and subsequent expansions of potential travel range, along with growth in media and the development of the video game industry, for many, terrae incognitae has shifted from places on Earth to the intangible environments of interactive media. While the virtual environments of video games can be fantastic, they are also designed and created by human beings to exist entirely in relation to the game player, who is an adventurer, explorer, settler, civilizer, or conqueror. Using qualitative research methods, this dissertation analyzes the geographies online video gaming in relation to an original framework based on the mutually constitutive concepts of representation, exploration, and geographic narrative, as well as the intersecting roles of myth, fantasy, and the virtual in shaping narratively structured imaginative environments. With specific chapters examining themes of interaction between human and software, gender and sexuality, exploration, narrative, cooperation, and creativity, this dissertation proposes that video games can be best understood as both collaborative representations and virtual environments. / text

Children’s understanding of space is a fusion of reality and fantasy, in which the physical environment, play, and imagination assume important roles. The boundary between the imaginative realm of the child and the physical realm of the world is blurred and penetrable, allowing for uninhibited associations and assimilations with the environment. A design for a children’s library is used to develop a method for designing potent environments for children to experience, play, and imagine. Using a palette of experiential qualities and memorable episodes to inform a set of parts, a series of spaces and activities or events are then dynamically assembled. The library, located within a forest site in Vancouver, is the testing ground for this assembly, playing with spatial and material configurations to blur perceptions of reality and fantasy, between the surrounding natural environment and the constructed one, as well as between the activities of learning and playing, in order to create a dynamic environment for childen.

A satisfactory definition of the imagination has proved elusive in Western philosophy. Two contemporary French thinkers, Gilbert Durand and Paul Ricoeur, are concerned with establishing a fundamental philosophy of imagination. For Durand the imagination is the source of symbolic mediations that are both therapeutic and theophanic. His theory is grounded in a Platonist-esoteric tradition which he supports by a philosophy of the imaginal (coined and articulated by Henry Corbin, a French Islamicist). Ricoeur, in contrast, sees the imagination as a creative cognitive mediator in a dialectic model of knowledge. Within a critical framework the imagination functions at the limits of experience and expression as a catalyst provoking new insights and ways of being. Both theories support a philosophy that rehabilitates the imagination from its former denigrated and suspect categorizations, though Ricoeur's programme is more relevant to contemporary philosophical issues.

There is recent interest in a narrative approach to values education. Perhaps with the intention of responding to needs of the pluralistic, multicultural society emerging at the end of the 1990s, values educators are turning their attention to the role of story telling and narrative in our moral development. This is an important contribution to values education because narrative approaches allow bridges to be built between different individuals and cultures and for a profound understanding of others to become possible. Many of the narrative approaches rest on a fuzzy or narrow definition of moral imagination. My thesis tries to clarify imaginations' abilities and gifts. I have reflected on the writings of Kieran Egan to establish what imagination brings to education and also the relationship between narrative and imagination. The final piece of my thesis sketches an outline of a moral imagination in consultation with two authors: Daniel Maguire and Mark Johnson. Through very different approaches, they both arrive at the idea that it is imagination which in fact underpins moral understanding. Kieran Egan opens the door to the idea of imagination and Daniel Maguire and Mark Johnson complete the picture by pointing out that imagination is our capacity to create moral understanding.

This dissertation explored the cognitive processes and neural substrates underlying the simulation and construction of novel mental representations, by manipulating factors influencing construction ability. Across four experiments, subjects constructed novel events by relating multiple cue words to a single context word in order to make a coherent representation. Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether memory deficits related to age and amnesia due to medial temporal lobe lesions affect event construction performance. Both older adults and patients with amnesia showed deficits in event construction, with poorer performance at increasing mnemonic loads. Moreover, older adults’ construction ability was associated with memory performance, suggesting that associative encoding processes are crucial for simulation tasks. Experiments 3a and 3b examined whether semantic congruency between items and context influences event construction and subsequent memory. In Experiment 3a, younger adults constructed imagined events with from cue words that were typically or atypically related to the context word. Atypical events were less coherent, and were rated as poorer in quality and more difficult to construct. Experiment 3b also showed an advantage for typical trials on a cued recall test, suggesting the congruency of an imagined event with prior knowledge has a strong influence on its subsequent retrieval. Experiment 4 used fMRI to determine the neural correlates of imagining. Constructing imagined events activated the hippocampus, medial prefrontal regions, and default mode network regions in comparison to a baseline condition. Moreover, clusters of activation in the anterior hippocampus were positively correlated with construction task performance across all task conditions, whereas activity in the medial frontal poles varied with individual differences in the typicality of imagined events. Posterior hippocampus was associated with the novelty of imagined events, but did not correlate strongly with the anterior hippocampus or task performance. Taken together, these studies suggest that these regions are crucial when constructing a novel imagined event, regardless of the nature of the stimuli. In particular, the hippocampus may be necessary to bind items during the construction process, especially as representations become increasingly complex.

This study is about how the research of monsters and contemporary artists who create monster-related work can help create monsters from my own imagination using the process of synthesis. In it I discuss how the monsters I created in my artwork tell a story. I also talk about how this study can be used to relate art to other fields of study such as English and History, and the idea of Visual Culture.

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The thesis investigates the effects of false memory and belief in the paranormal on reports of events. The first chapter reviews the existing literature on false memory. The main theories of how false memory develops are described and the individual differences of those susceptible to false memories are considered. The paranormal belief literature is then examined, particularly with regard to the cognitive differences between believers and disbelievers. It is concluded that these differences would be suggestive of a relationship between paranormal belief and false memory. The second chapter considers the relationship between imagination inflation, paranormal belief and ESP. No correlation between the factors was found. The third chapter examines whether pre-event suggestion and belief in the paranormal can affect experiences of `ghostly' phenomena in an allegedly haunted location. Evidence for the effect of belief in the paranormal was found, but there was no effect of pre-event suggestion or an interaction between the two factors. The fourth chapter investigates the effects of positive and negative during-event suggestion and paranormal belief on reports of events in the seance room, and the fifth chapter explores the effects of duringevent suggestion on reports of a key bending video. There was some evidence that during-event suggestion is effective in altering reports of events, and the causes for this effect are considered. Paranormal belief was not shown to consistently affect acceptance of suggestion, but may affect reports of phenomena which are judged to be paranormal. The thesis concludes that during-event suggestion and negative suggestion are areas which offer great potential for further research. The relationship between paranormal belief and false memory development has not been demonstrated. However, it has been shown that belief and suggestion can affect the manner in which situations are attended to and interpreted.