EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Prof Sally Andrews (U Sydney)

Psychology Colloquium:

Tuesday 31st May 4-5pm in Bayliss MCS G.33, followed by post- talk drinks in the Psychology Courtyard (or in really bad weather, the Psychology Common Room, 2nd floor of main psychology building)

Presenter: Prof Sally Andrews (U Sydney)

Sally Andrews is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Sydney, where she held the positions of Head of Psychology from 2005- 2011 and Associate Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Science from 2014-2016. She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia and has served on a number of Editorial Boards and as Associate Editor for Memory and Cognition and the Journal of Memory and Language. Her research focuses on the processes involved in visual word recognition and reading in skilled adult readers.

Abstract

Title: The Cognitive Science of Skilled Reading

Reading is a culturally engineered skill. It was a late acquisition of our species - the first writing systems were invented less than 6000 years ago and literacy has only been a widespread skill for about 200 years - and reading is also acquired gradually and relatively late in the life of an individual. Learning to read and write is therefore not "natural" or evolutionarily prepared in the same sense as learning to understand and produce spoken language. Nevertheless, recent neuroimaging evidence has shown that the same highly localised brain regions respond selectively to written text across a wide range of writing systems. Understanding how humans have developed a uniform solution to such a recent cultural invention provides insight into both the complexity of skilled reading and how the brain adapts to a new cognitive skill. In this talk I will overview evidence about the cognitive architecture of the skilled reading system and consider its implications for theories of the representations and processes underlying cognitive skills.