ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science puts cognitive scientific disciplines in conversation with theatre and performance studies. Under the general heading of ‘cognitive science,’ we include the methods and insights of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary studies and those social scientific approaches that have been influenced by these three disciplines. Cognitive scientists are committed to discovering and validating empirical evidence about perception, imagination, empathy, the emotions, movement, consciousness and other areas of human behaviour that can provide reliable insights across the varieties of our species’ cultures, histories and languages. Theatre and performance scholars have long understood the general relevance of these areas of knowledge to acting, spectating, training, criticism, history and other parts of our field, but have mostly relied on traditional concepts of mind and body to investigate them. In the past 20 years, scholars and scientists have begun to systematically apply the empirical knowledge derived from the cognitive sciences to how we practise and think about varieties of performance. We are happy that several of the leading investigators in this emerging interdiscipline have contributed chapters to our Routledge Companion.
