Engaging With the Unreal: Introduction to the Special Issue (Vol. 45, No. 2)

This is a special issue of Imagination, Cognition, and Personality that deals with fantasy and cognition. People engage with the unreal continuously in daily life. These engagements can take various forms. Bilbo the hobbit is not real, yet I can read about him in the novel The Hobbit, I can pretend that he is my dinner guest, I can watch him run around in the movie The Hobbit, I can remember that he grows really old and other features about him. Other ways of engaging with the unreal include watching television, playing computer games, daydreaming, and engaging in virtual reality. In this way, people interact with, encode, store, retrieve, and think about information that extends beyond their immediate reality. Analyzing how people engage with the unreal is central to understanding imaginative thought, media consumption, narrative engagement, virtual experiences, and aspects of human communication such as role play and pretend play