Mats Haraldsen

Haraldsen, M., & Trasmundi, S. B. (2025). Making a comic: cognitive event analysis of narrative affordance navigation. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2025.2557344

Haraldsen, M. & Kukkonen, K. (Forthcoming). Thinking elsewhere: Designer environments of literature and religion. Religion, Brain and Behavior.

Haraldsen, M. (2025). Engineering the mind: the arts of memory, writing literature and economic agency in digital technology. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02253-6

Haraldsen, M. (2026). Remembering in writing: Literature, memory and the extended mind (PhD dissertation).

Haraldsen, M., & Trasmundi, S. B. (Forthcoming). Open peer commentary. From life stages to micro-events: Ecological psychology and affordance management. Behavioral and Brain Sciences

• Haraldsen, Mats; Trasmundi, Sarah Bro & Baggs, Edward (2026). Subjective selection requires objective constraints. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. ISSN 0140-525X. 49, p. e295–e295. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X25104391. Full text in Research Archive
• Haraldsen, Mats & Trasmundi, Sarah Bro (2026). Vittorini’s double realities in Conversations in Sicily: Embodied remembering in reading. Memory Studies. ISSN 1750-6980. doi: 10.1177/17506980261425542. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Readers, we argue, frequently engage with the events unfolding in literary texts without relying on symbolic representation. When immersing themselves in embodied and imaginative depictions of memories during reading, readers can directly experience and engage with these cognitive processes. We construct a theoretical framework rooted in an embodied-ecological view on language and reading to argue against the ‘code view’ where reading is seen as a translation of text into symbolic, mental representations. Drawing on recent developments in research on memory, we argue instead that reading can enable readers to re-experience the memory process depicted in the text. We apply this theoretical approach to Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily and show how embodied language can establish a direct connection between readers’ minded bodies and Vittorini’s protagonist’s memories of his childhood in Sicily.

• Haraldsen, Mats & Kukkonen, Karin (2025). Thinking elsewhere: designer environments for religion and literature. Religion, Brain and Behavior. ISSN 2153-599X. doi: 10.1080/2153599X.2025.2574276. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article investigates how certain kinds of reading and meditation reduce attention to the here-and-now in order to leave room for imaginative experiences in carefully crafted religious and cultural designer environments. The article thereby engages with recent accounts on cultural acquisition and religious beliefs. From the perspective of active inference and 4E cognition, we argue that designer environments allow practitioners to go beyond modulating their predictions according to the minds of others, and instead enable them to go “elsewhere,” that is, to imaginatively experience different sets of probabilities that can change how they predict the world in the here-and-now. Three different works are studied: Amadis of Gaul (1508), a best-selling series of chivalric novels by Garcia de Montalvo, The Spiritual Exercises (1548), a meditation manual by Ignatius of Loyola, as well as Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes. These works have in common that they rebuild expectations in relation to the self by positioning it in new environments, and thereby extending the range of experience. Through such thinking “elsewhere” in designer environments, we argue, readers and meditators can modulate their attentional systems so as to perceive and act in the world in new ways.

• Haraldsen, Mats & Trasmundi, Sarah Bro (2025). Making a comic: cognitive event analysis of narrative affordance navigation. Cogent Arts & Humanities. 12(1). doi: 10.1080/23311983.2025.2557344. Full text in Research Archive
• Haraldsen, Mats (2025). Engineering the mind: the arts of memory, writing literature and economic agency in digital technology. AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture and Communication. ISSN 0951-5666. doi: 10.1007/s00146-025-02253-6. Full text in Research Archive
• Haraldsen, Mats (2025). Making Sense of the Past Together. Collaborative Remembering in Cry, Mother Spain. Poetics Today. ISSN 0333-5372. doi: 10.1215/03335372-11677692. Full text in Research Archive
• Haraldsen, Mats (2023). Extended Remembering: Georges Perec and Writing as Thinking. Style. ISSN 0039-4238. 57(1), p. 11–33. doi: 10.5325/style.57.1.0011. Full text in Research Archive
• Haraldsen, Mats (2021). Coming together: Embodied and pre-reflective interaction in The Plague. Orbis Litterarum. ISSN 0105-7510. doi: 10.1111/oli.12322. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Albert Camus’s The Plague has often been investigated as a moral deliberation on humans’ responsibilities in the face of a deadly threat, be it as an allegory of World War Two or in a more general fashion. In this article, I argue that by looking at the pre-reflective and embodied aspects of the interaction between the protagonists, the novel can be read in a new light. Seen from the perspective of contemporary cognitive science, especially what is known as “enactivism,” I argue that central cognitive and interactive processes in the novel seem to be running below the level of explicit dialogue. Thus, we can understand the moral process of The Plague more accurately if we take into account new insights into the important role that the body, our surroundings, and the interaction itself play when humans come together and interact. Finally, I argue that an analysis of The Plague should pay special attention to how Rieux, the narrator and main protagonist, operationalizes these embodied and pre-reflective mechanisms through his use of narrative techniques.

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• Haraldsen, Mats & Trasmundi, Sarah Bro (2026). From life stages to micro-events: Ecological psychology and affordance management. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. ISSN 0140-525X. 49. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x25103208. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Abstract This commentary addresses the issue of creativity and the role of materiality in affordance management. We argue that research in ecological psychology and the method of cognitive event analysis can complement Ko and Neuberg’s life span perspective by showing how agents shape material environments to enable unpredictability and creativity when managing their affordance landscape.

• Haraldsen, Mats (2026). Remembering in writing: Literature, memory and the extended mind. Norsk litteraturvitenskapelig tidsskrift. ISSN 0809-2044. 29(1), p. 59–59. doi: 10.18261/nlvt.29.1.9. Full text in Research Archive
• Haraldsen, Mats (2025). Å gå utover seg selv: Gud, kunstnerisk ydmykhet og det menneskelige sinn. Full text in Research Archive
• Haraldsen, Mats (2020). Sustainable literature: Fiction and the mind. Full text in Research Archive

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