[PDF] The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach To Understanding How The Mind Reads Fixed

The Reading Mind is a brilliant, beautifully crafted, and accessible exploration of arguably life's most important skill: reading. Daniel T. Willingham, the bestselling author of Why Don't Students Like School?, offers a perspective that is rooted in contemporary cognitive research. He deftly describes the incredibly complex and nearly instantaneous series of events that occur from the moment a child sees a single letter to the time they finish reading. The Reading Mind explains the fascinating journey from seeing letters, then words, sentences, and so on, with the author highlighting each step along the way. This resource covers every aspect of reading, starting with two fundamental processes: reading by sight and reading by sound. It also addresses reading comprehension at all levels, from reading for understanding at early levels to inferring deeper meaning from texts and novels in high school. The author also considers the undeniable connection between reading and writing, as well as the important role of motivation as it relates to reading. Finally, as a cutting-edge researcher, Willingham tackles the intersection of our rapidly changing technology and its effects on learning to read and reading.

Prompted by a scathing attack by linguist and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky, by the 1950s behaviorism as the dominant psychological discipline was in decline. The introduction of the digital computer led to the information-processing approach, inspiring psychologists to think of the mind in terms of a sequence of processing stages (Goldstein, 2011).

Having discussed these definitions, a clear connection between narrative comprehension and social cognition arises: both are centered around accessing and understanding the minds of others, be it narrative protagonists or people we encounter in the real world. This connection is the basis of various theories that suggest that exposure to narratives could foster social-cognitive abilities. The rationale for these theories mostly rests on either the activation of social-cognitive processes during narrative reading (process-based theories; Mar, 2018), or the transfer of knowledge through the narrative content (content-based theories; Mar, 2018). We will now discuss both positions in turn.

The long-term association between exposure to fiction and social-cognitive skills in adults has since been observed in multiple other studies, using a variety of measures (e.g., Black & Barnes, 2015b; Djikic et al., 2013; Fong et al., 2013; Mar et al., 2009; Schwering et al., 2021; for an overview, see Mumper & Gerrig, 2017). Moreover, in an fMRI study Tamir et al. (2016) found that the positive relationship between fiction exposure (ART) and performance on mindreading tasks was mediated by the degree to which the brain regions related to theory of mind were activated when participants read social narratives, providing support for the idea that social cognition develops through repeated activation of social-cognitive processes elicited by narratives.

The rationale behind most experimental studies assessing the causal effects of reading narratives is that if reading narratives leads to improved social cognition, then social-cognitive performance should be enhanced after exposure to narratives, but not after exposure to nonnarrative texts or no exposure to any text. One line of research based on this approach has used interventions to study the social-cognitive potential of narratives. In these studies, participants in the intervention group are repeatedly exposed to narratives over an extended period of time (e.g., a week up to several months). Social-cognitive abilities are measured both before and after the intervention, and improvements in abilities are compared between the intervention group and a control group.

Moreover, the finding that reading a piece of literary fiction has a positive effect when compared with nonfiction has also been backed up by additional studies (Bal & Veltkamp, 2013; Black & Barnes, 2015a, 2015b; Pino & Mazza, 2016). For example, using a within-subjects design, Black and Barnes (2015a, 2015b) found that reading literary fiction significantly improved scores on the RMET compared with the effect of reading nonfiction. Moreover, performance on an intuitive physics understanding test was not affected by reading condition, suggesting that the positive effect of literary fiction cannot be explained as a general improvement of (nonsocial and social) cognitive abilities as a result of the complexity of literary texts. Thus, the authors conclude that there seems to be a unique, direct link between one-time exposure to (literary) narratives and social cognition, rather than cognition in general.

Following the theoretical accounts that put a special emphasis on the general concepts of literariness and fictionality as the driving forces behind the social-cognitive potential of narratives (e.g., Keen, 2007; Zunshine, 2011), most empirical studies have aimed to investigate the difference between literary fiction, popular fiction, and nonfiction. As described above, some studies have found evidence for a beneficial effect of literariness by comparing the effect of reading a piece of literary fiction to the effect of reading a piece of popular fiction (Kidd & Castano, 2013, 2018; Pino & Mazza, 2016; van Kuijk et al., 2018). However, others have not been able to reproduce this finding (Camerer et al., 2018; Panero et al., 2016; Samur et al., 2018) and this approach has since been criticized (Gavaler & Johnson, 2017; Koopman & Hakemulder, 2015; Panero et al., 2016). One of the objections is that the texts in the original Kidd and Castano (2013) experiments were chosen based on extrinsic criteria, such as prizes and ranking (for an elaborate critique, see Gavaler & Johnson, 2017), and the various texts used in the different conditions were poorly matched on, for example, content. Hence, it is hard to disentangle exactly which intrinsic characteristics of the textual stimuli were responsible for the difference found between literary and popular fiction narratives (Gavaler & Johnson, 2017).

Besides these trait-related individual differences, a study by Koopman (2015) suggests that personal experience with the topic of a narrative leads to more prosocial behavior and empathic understanding: participants who had personal experience with depression were more likely to donate money to charity and reported more understanding for depressed patients after reading, regardless of the genre of the text they had just read (see also Green, 2004). The author suggests that readers with personal experience with a topic might be more engaged by a story, potentially leading to more activation of social-cognitive processes. This idea is backed up by an fMRI study by Chow et al. (2015): not only did readers report more vivid imagery when they had personal experience with the situations described in a story, it was also found that connectivity within motor and visual regions increased with personal experience, suggesting that personal experience leads to richer or deeper forms of narrative engagement.

To conclude, future studies should focus on the characteristics that make readers more or less sensitive to the social-cognitive potential of narratives in general and in relation to specific types of narratives and textual characteristics. Including measures of individual differences in experiments might reveal interesting patterns of sensitivity in heterogeneous groups of readers that might otherwise have been overshadowed by the absence of significant main effects of narrative exposure. Besides emotional disposition, social-cognitive development, verbal abilities, personal experience and preference, additional relevant characteristics that have been found to play a role in other narrative processes include the need for affect (Maio & Esses, 2001) and the need for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; see also Appel & Richter, 2010; Green et al., 2008; Kuijpers et al., 2019). Finally, the individual differences approach will not only advance our understanding of the precise workings of the social-cognitive potential of narratives but will also open up the possibility of reliably and strategically putting this potential into practice, for example in patient populations that need additional empathy training (Calarco et al., 2017).

Following theoretical accounts on the social-cognitive potential of narratives, most empirical studies have focused on the relationship between narrative reading and the broad concepts of empathy and theory of mind. Future studies should aim for both a deeper and broader view on the aspects of social cognition that narratives might influence. In this section we will discuss the practical and theoretical challenges that come with this line of research.

Secondly, Turner and Felisberti (2017) have noted the lack of tasks that can reliably measure the subtle differences in mindreading abilities that can be expected among healthy adults. They argue that most tasks that are available suffer from ceiling effects, as they were originally designed to be used in clinical and developmental contexts, for example to distinguish those with autism spectrum disorders from healthy controls (see also Black, 2019). In general, then, an important avenue for future research is to develop tasks and measures that can support more specific claims about the relationship between narratives and particular social-cognitive abilities.

Another important avenue for future studies involves broadening the scope of social-cognitive abilities under investigation beyond empathy and theory of mind. As Mar (2018) has shown in his SPaCEN framework, the proposed mechanism behind the relationship between narrative reading and empathic and mindreading abilities can be applied to a range of aspects of social cognition, as long as these abilities depend on either trainable processes that are activated by narrative reading or knowledge that narratives can convey. 2b1af7f3a8