Supporting Impactful Research: MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant Awarded to Asst. Prof. James Openshaw
Assistant Professor James Openshaw has been awarded the MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant (August 2025) for his research project Referential (dis)continuities in imagination and memory.
Congratulations, Prof Openshaw!
Abstract:
Remember the last hawker meal you ate. Now imagine the next one you will eat. In comparing these two tasks, our minds seem engaged in fundamentally different activities. Memory is directed upon events we experienced; imagination can represent events that have yet to occur - or that might have occurred but never will. Yet findings in psychology and neuroscience suggest these mental activities are more alike than they first appear. Some have come to think that remembering and imagining are activities of a single cognitive system, one aimed at reliably constructing event-simulations from a common set of cognitive resources.
This project investigates a key question in the vicinity: how do memory and imagination secure reference to events? Where do the similarities end and the differences begin? When remembering succeeds, it is about some particular event(s) in one’s past: it picks out something real. Can imagining genuinely refer to future events in the same way, perhaps even via the same means? The project examines this and other referential (dis)continuities between remembering and imagining: what information they draw upon, what they aim to be about, what constitutes success, and in what distinctive ways they can fail.
