Reading is one of the most sophisticated demonstrations of human pattern recognition and symbolic processing skill. Skilled readers effortlessly comprehend written text at rates of at least 300 words per minute, despite the complex interactions between perceptual, cognitive and memory processes required for effective comprehension. Understanding how we achieve this remarkable feat has been a focus of investigation since the birth of experimental psychology.

Over the last two decades, visual word recognition has been at the forefront of developments in cognitive science. This book brings together many of the most influential contributors to these developments to reflect on current issues in the cognitive science of lexical processing and the methods required for further progress. The first section focuses on computational models. Written words provide a fertile context for large-scale modeling and the domain of lexical retrieval has become a test-bed for evaluating competing theoretical frameworks. The later sections draw upon cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science and neuroscience to elaborate critical theoretical issues and to develop novel research tools.

From Inkmarks to Ideas provides advanced students and researchers with a comprehensive overview of the critical theoretical and empirical controversies in current research on the cognitive science of lexical processing and reading.

Sally Andrews is Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts. She has published influential papers that have established "benchmark" phenomena that are used to evaluate current computational models of visual word recognition.