Kathy Rastle

Kathleen Rastle is a cognitive psychologist and Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London where she was previously the Head of Department of Psychology (2015-2019). Her research has made fundamental contributions to understanding of reading and learning to read. Education Rastle did her PhD with Professor Max Coltheart at Macquarie University, where she contributed to the development of the DRC model of reading, a computational theory of how adults read aloud single words. Career Subsequently, her work has focused on the statistical regularities present in written language, and on how learners acquire knowledge of these through instruction and experience.

She has been particularly interested in understanding how written language conveys meaningful (morphological) information and in how skilled, adult readers use this information in the initial stages of word recognition.

Rastle won the British Psychological Society Cognitive Section Prize (2018)