What physiological changes and cerebral traces tell us about adhesion to fiction during theater-watching?
• 1Laboratoire d’Imagerie et Neurosciences Cognitives, FRE 3289 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Faculté de Médecine, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France • 2équipe de Recherches Théâtrales et Cinématographiques, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Paris, France Live theater is typically designed to alter the state of mind of the audience. Indeed, the perceptual inputs issuing from a live theatrical performance are intended to represent something else, and the actions, emphasized by the writing and staging, are the key prompting the adhesion of viewers to fiction, i.e., their belief that it is real. This phenomenon raises the issue of the cognitive processes governing access to a fictional reality during live theater and of their cerebral underpinnings. To get insight into the physiological substrates of adhesion we recreated the peculiar context of watching live drama in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, with simultaneous recording
