Carl Sagan (1980) argued that reading is “perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other” and allowing one to be “inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.” My research attempts to understand the mental processes that allow this to happen. Put another way, my research attempts to answer the question: How are vision, attention, memory, and language processing coordinated to support our amazing capacity to read? My interest in this question is twofold.
The first is that reading plays a critical role in the functioning of any democratically healthy, technologically advanced society. It therefore stands to reason that one might contribute to the betterment of society by advancing our understanding of how to teach this critical skill. My research, in collaboration with my many colleagues, makes a modest contribution to this end.
The second reason why I study reading is that it provides an ideal “lens” through which to examine how perception and cognition are coordinated to support a critically important life skill. These mental processes minimally include the visual and attentional processing required to encode the printed forms of words so that their pronunciations and meanings can be accessed from memory, as well as the linguistic processing required to understand the individual sentences and discourse.
Because these processes are extremely complex, my research uses three complementary methodologies: computer modelling, brain imaging (EEG and MEG), and eye-tracking experiments. Computer models allow one to test hypotheses that are otherwise too complex to reason about (e.g., see Hintzman, 1989), while brain imaging and eye-tracking experiments allow one to measure cognition as it is occurring, in a non-invasive and ecological valid manner (e.g., see Rayner, 1998).
If you would like to learn more about my research or would like copies of any of my research publications, please e-mail me. My first book, Computational Models of Reading: A Handbook, is available from Oxford University Press. My second book (co-authored with Dr. Lili Yu), The Psychology of Reading: Insights from Chinese, is available from Cambridge University Press. My forthcoming book (also co-edited with Dr. Lili Yu), The Cambridge Companion to the Psychology of Reading, is in preparation and should be available in 2026.
“On the outside, the reader has rotated his eyes only a few millimeters … But on the inside, there has been a rapid succession of intricate events. Clearly, this succession could only be the product of a complex information processing system … It contains components that are asked to perform amazing feats with amazing rapidity, and precisely in concert.” – Gough (1972, p. 341)
Click here for Reichle (2021) corrigenda.
Click here for Reichle and Yu (2024) corrigenda.