Abstract The human ability to tell apart reality from fiction is intriguing. Through a range of media, such as novels and movies, we are able to readily engage in fictional worlds and experience alternative realities. Yet even when we are completely immersed and emotionally engaged within these worlds, we have little difficulty in leaving the fictional landscapes and getting back to the day-to-day of our own world. How are we able to do this? How do we acquire our understanding of our real world? How is this similar to and different from the development of our knowledge of fictional worlds? In exploring these questions, this article makes the case for a novel multilevel explanation (called BLINCS) of our implicit understanding of the reality–fiction distinction, namely that it is derived from the fact that the worlds of fiction, relative to reality, are bounded, inference-light, curated, and sparse.

中文翻译：

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我们如何区分虚构与现实

摘要 人类区分现实与虚构的能力令人着迷。通过小说和电影等一系列媒体，我们能够轻松地进入虚构世界并体验另类现实。然而，即使我们完全沉浸在这些世界中并在情感上投入其中，我们也可以毫不费力地离开虚构的风景，回到我们自己世界的日常生活中。我们怎么能做到这一点？我们如何获得对现实世界的理解？这与我们对虚构世界知识的发展有何相似和不同？在探索这些问题时，本文提出了一种新颖的多层次解释（称为 BLINCS）的案例，以解释我们对现实与虚构区别的隐含理解，即它源于虚构世界，