The Perks of Being a Bookworm

Falk Huettig is a Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands. He holds honorary professorships at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany, and the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

• List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgments; Part I. Foundations: 1. Scripted influence: written media transform societies and individuals; 2. The shaping of mind: comparing illiterate and literate cognition; Part II. Reading-Driven General Cognitive Enhancement: 3. Intelligence: literacy increases IQ scores; 4. Abstraction: literacy enhances generalization from individual experiences; Part III. Reading-Driven Enhanced Vision: 5. Visual discrimination: literacy enhances keeping mirror images apart; 6. Visual recognition: literacy enhances recognition of faces; 7. Visual attention: literacy enhances mental spotlights; Part IV. Reading-Driven Enhanced Memory: 8. Long and short-term memory: literacy enhances storing, maintaining, manipulating, and retrieving of information; 9. Memory resilience: literacy enhances cognitive reserve; Part V. Reading-Driven Enhanced Spoken Language: 10. Spoken words: alphabetic literacy enhances awareness and recognition of spoken words; 11. Prediction in spoken language: literacy enhances anticipation of what others might say next; Part VI. Reading-Driven Enhanced Reasoning: 12. Deductive reasoning: literacy enhances drawing of valid inferences; 13. Critical Reasoning: Literacy Enhances Reasoning about the Validity of Information; Part VII. Conclusion and Outlook: 14. The Benefits of Reading: Enhanced Literate Minds; 15. Utopia or dystopia? The prospect of a postliterate world; Notes; Index.

'For the first time, the various ways in which reading benefits the development of cognitive skills, including some unexpected ones such as face recognition, are brought together in such a comprehensible and authoritative way by one of the main players in this research field. Also, it is fun to read.' Denis Drieghe, Professor in Experimental Psychology, University of Southampton