Anezka Kuzmicova (Stockholm University)
Researchers in psychology and related disciplines tend to study the process of reading as if it were wholly decoupled from the immediate physical environment. For instance, attention to a story is measured as the inverse of the reader’s ambient awareness. Indeed, story reading is often practiced with the objective to mentally escape from unpleasant places such as crowded trains or waiting rooms. In my talk, however, I will show that this is only one mode of reading among many, and that the relationship between a written story and the physical environment is subtler than commonly assumed. Specifically, I will show how the environment can also serve as a prop for story-related mental imagery and/or a locus of pleasure, rather than being a sheer distractor. Finally, I will briefly report a recent study in which my collaborators and I found readers’ experiences to be strongly affected by the physical presence and/or concurrent activity of other people in a given environment.
Anezka Kuzmicova is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Her main research area is reading as cognitive process, embodied experience, and situated practice. Within this area she has work published or forthcoming on various topics, e.g.: readers’ mental imagery, immersion, and empathy; audiobook experience; the physical reading environment; reading on mobile devices. She works at the intersections of the humanities and the cognitive and social sciences, and serves as working group leader and scientific secretary in COST Action IS1404 E-READ (Evolution of Reading in the Age of Digitisation).