Fifteen years ago, at our symposium in San Francisco, I presented a review of recent research in cognitive psychology that had, I thought, some relevance to the practice of readership research. The paper received a polite reception, but there seemed to be some initial bewilderment regarding its applicability. Happily, that bewilderment seems to have diminished over time. It is probably the symposium paper that receives the most frequent requests for copies – even at the distance of these many years.
While this paper is substantially different from its predecessor, it shares a key feature: it asks you to consider modes of learning that are far removed from the statistically-based, inferential methods that form the normative core for our profession. In the case of the San Francisco paper on cognitive methods, some of the evidence came from small-sample controlled experiments. Some came from the study of anomalous, clinically “interesting� individuals. Some came from laboratory experiments. Some came from such allied fields as linguistics or clinical psychology. None of the studies reviewed there relied upon conventional probability surveys, analyzed with the familiar statistical tools of sociology and market research. Scientific progress does not depend exclusively upon those tools and approaches, despite their centrality to our own field.

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