• Acknowledgements


• Introduction: Literature and Predictive Processing


• I: Narrative Design


• 1. Plots and Probability Transformations


• 2. Probability Designs


• 3. The Height of Drop


• II: The Embodied Reader


• III. Into the Mental Library


• 1. Intertextual Precision Expectations


• 2. Things That Did Not Happen


• 3. Reading by Proxy


• 4. Artificial, In the Best Sense of the Word


• IV: An Argument From Design


• 1.Otto's Novel


• 2. Literature as a Designer Environment


• 3. The Cognitive Work of Form


• Endnotes


• Bibliography

Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Her work investigates how the novel emerged as a genre designed for particular cognitive and emotional engagements and how the poetics of earlier periods and cognitive poetics today can speak to each other. At the University of Oslo, Kukkonen heads the interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative "Literature, Cognition and Emotions" (2019-2023).

In Probability Designs, Karin Kukkonen presents the predictive processing model of cognition as a means of exploring narrative structure and reader experience. Utilizing the literary canon of various cultures, Kukkonen combines theory and cognitive science to analyze how reader expectation and prediction shape literature, and how literature accomplishes cognitive feats that determine the human capacity for free, exploratory thought.