Toward a Psychology of Reading

The gap between laboratory research and its application often seemed enormous and was particularly true in the area of reading. Originally published in 1977, Toward a Psychology of Reading was an attempt to span some of the differences between research and practice at the time. Although the book would not supply the practitioner with quick and easy answers to many real everyday problems, it was hoped that researchers, teachers and students concerned with the relationship between reading and the cognitive abilities underlying this skill would find productive and useful the cross fertilization between theory and application.

The thrust of this volume is that the reading process is not only more complex than previously assumed, but that like so many other cognitive and linguistic skills, the richness and depth of the complexity increases the more closely it is examined. Today it can be read in its historical context.

Arthur S. Reber was best known for his scientific research on unconscious learning, particularly that using an “artificial grammar” paradigm to examine how people acquire knowledge about the structure of a set of stimuli with little explicit awareness. His early work moved the field forward in important ways, eventually becoming widely adopted and generating tremendous interest in the cognitive unconscious. His later research ranged fearlessly over topics as diverse as implicit learning and tacit knowledge, the psychology of risk and gambling, the evolutionary origins of consciousness, and candidate biochemical mechanisms for the emergence of sentience.

Don L. Scarborough attended Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with Saul Sternberg and earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology in 1968. He was a Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York until his retirement in 2001, and was also on the faculty of the Computer Science department after receiving a degree in that field in 1985. Professor Scarborough’s primary research interests were word recognition processes and the perception of music.