Human Pacemakers and Experiential Reading
Frontiers in Communication June 14, 2022 Sarah Bro Trasmundi, Juan Toro, Anne Mangen 10 citations
Reading is best understood as a cultural-cognitive performance involving living bodies actively engaging with materials, not as a silent, disembodied neural process. The authors propose cognitive pacemaking—an action-perception phenomenon—as the key mechanism for controlling attention during reading, driven by embodied modulations of lived temporality. Meaning emerges from multimodal engagement with the text, not just linguistic decoding. The framework combines close reading of a classic literary text with a qualitative study of university students reading different short texts. Empirical reading research should examine how embodied reading varies across contexts, genres, media, and personalities to better design reading settings.