Profile of the research team

Man as a cultural being constitutes the traditional subject of humanities. However, the cultural studies scholarship , which has been gaining momentum since the 1990s, often overemphasizes the culture-dependent and relative nature of human behaviour, and is sometimes biased towards the exclusivity of cultural determination in cognition. In doing so, modern cultural studies completely lose sight of the complementary perspective, i.e. the biological roots of cultural phenomena. As a consequence, art objects are also interpreted as mere manifestations of socio-cultural symbol systems, and components that go beyond culturally encoded meaning tend to be ignored.

Our research group was founded in 2014 with the aim to analyze the processes of reception of literary texts and films, drawing on findings from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Its research focuses on the evolutionary cognitive mechanisms that play a significant role in the reception of literature and film. Areas such as causal reasoning, mindreading, narrative empathy, tension generation, or moral judgement are in the center of our scholarly curiosity. Our principal aim is to bring together researchers working in these fields through regularly held workshops, lectures and conferences.

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