Episodic Memory and Narrative Production

This chapter begins by reviewing the highly imaginative spaces of children’s literature and offers an account on why they rarely contain topological frames by examining the ways in which these texts violate the conditions for the appearance of topological frames caused by, for example, motion. Next, this chapter examines how imagined scenes are constructed and offers a cognitive account of narrative production based on episodic memory and in particular, Episodic Future Thinking (EFT). This theory argues that fictional spaces are not processed any differently from real spaces; the same cognitive operations exist for both. EFT works in association with the perceptual system and thus, any original perceptual information recorded in the real world can be utilised by EFT for a fictional world. This chapter links to the work in previous chapters on visual perception and demonstrates that imagined spaces contain, and maintain, the same visual process of global to local registration and works as part of a series of cognitive operations that exist long before the act of narrative production has begun.