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

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.

Social cognition refers to the cognitive processes related to the perception and interpretation of the stimuli around us to develop the knowledge we have about our own mind and others' minds. One way to address the major themes and findings across areas of social cognitive research is to divide these domains into the understanding of others (e.g., ToM, empathy), self-understanding (e.g., visual self-recognition, agency), self-control (e.g., impulse control, reappraisal), and the interface between self and others. The current theory of these processes proposes a dichotomous scheme. On one end of the spectrum are responses that are exclusively controlled, conscious, and deliberate (e.g., self-reflection). On the other end of the spectrum are the responses that are automatic, unintentional, and unconsidered (e.g., feeling rejected). Between these extremes are processes that engage or mediate controlled and automatic responses (e.g., reappraisal, ToM) (Lieberman, 2007). Emotional regulation, for example, often involves the initiation of new emotional responses or the alteration of ongoing responses through volitional regulatory actions that are used to influence the regulatory process. Failures to adaptively regulate emotional responses can be related to some psychiatric disorders (Ochsner & Gross, 2005).

Because the cognitive understanding of ToM also extends to other abilities (Sabbagh, Moulson, & Harkness, 2004), theorists developed tests that measure the capacity to read others to understand an emotional state by reading the eyes or facial cues (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001). This paradigm involves more automatic skills, and it has been called socioperceptual or mental state decoding (Bora, Eryavuz, Kayahan, Sungu, & Veznedaroglu, 2006; Gokcen, Bora, Erermis, Kesikci, & Aydin, 2009; Sabbagh et al., 2004). In the Face Test (Adolphs, 2002), the participant is asked to look at a picture of a face and name which of seven basic emotions it represents (i.e., happiness, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, and distress). Composed of 36 pictures, the Eyes Test is used to test for the decoding of mental states. The adaptation of Baron-Cohen (2001) has 27 pictures and has been utilized in several scientific studies (Gokcen et al., 2009). The test asks the subject to name the mental state of the person in the picture, and the picture shows just the eye region. 2b1af7f3a8