Please Note: The main page lists projects via BBSRC Research Theme(s) quoted and then relevant Topic(s).
Digital Reading and the Neurocognitive Foundations of Deep Reading and Critical Thinking
Secondary Supervisor(s): Dr Victoria Adedeji, Dr Ascension Pagan
University of Registration: University of Leicester
BBSRC Research Themes:
Project Outline
Critical thinking enables people to analyse arguments, evaluate evidence, compare perspectives, synthesise information, and construct well-reasoned conclusions. Fundamental to success in Higher Education, it draws on attention, working memory, language comprehension, executive function, and inferential reasoning.
These processes also underpin deep reading: sustained and effortful engagement with complex texts. Deep reading requires readers to maintain attention, integrate information, draw inferences, evaluate claims, and connect ideas with existing knowledge. It therefore exercises skills underpinning critical thinking, while repeated engagement with complex text may help develop and maintain them.
In recent years, digital technologies have transformed how people engage with written information. Social media, news feeds, messaging platforms, and other short-form content now occupy a substantial part of everyday reading. Although they offer opportunities for communication and learning, they can encourage rapid, fragmented, and frequently interrupted patterns of engagement that differ markedly from the sustained, effortful engagement characteristic of deep reading.
If deep reading helps to exercise and develop the cognitive processes supporting critical thinking, a shift towards predominantly short-form reading may have important consequences. Yet, little is known about how digital reading practices shape the cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting deep reading or the potential implications of changing reading practices for the development of critical thinking.
This interdisciplinary PhD will investigate relationships between digital reading practices, deep reading and critical thinking, using a range of methods. The student will use questionnaires to characterise participants’ digital reading habits and standardised assessments to measure critical thinking. They will also conduct behavioural reading experiments examining how reading conditions affect comprehension, attention, inference, and argument evaluation. Eye-tracking techniques will be used to provide detailed insight into the cognitive processes associated with these reading behaviours. Findings will contribute to cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and education, while informing how critical thinking can be supported in a digital world.
