Understanding Material-Based Imagination: Cognitive Coupling of Animation and User Action in Interactive Digital Artworks

We argue, from a perspective integrating cognitive science and the arts, that interactive animated visual graphics, as embodied images whose understanding relies on users’ perceptual and motor apparatuses, connect both mental and material notions of images. Drawing upon cognitive science theories of conceptual blending and material anchors, recent neuroscience results regarding mirror neurons, and phenomenological approaches to human-computer interaction, we bridge the gap between visual perception and bodily interaction in digital environments – calling this process as “material-based imagination” (in contrast to the general notion of imagination as purely a mental activity).