Rate My Professor Kevin Paterson

Professor Kevin Paterson serves as Professor of Experimental Psychology and Head of the School of Psychology and Vision Sciences at the University of Leicester, where he has held positions since 2003 and was promoted to full professor in 2016. As a first-generation graduate, he obtained his MA (Hons) with First Class honours in Psychology from the University of Glasgow in 1990 and his PhD in Psychology from the same university in 1996, supported by funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland in 1991. He also held visiting professorships at Tianjin Normal University in China from 2014 to 2017, followed by a 1000 Talents Visiting Professorship from 2017 to 2020.

Paterson's research examines cognitive mechanisms in reading across the lifespan, including children's reading development, skilled adult reading, and the impact of cognitive ageing, using high-precision eye movement measures and simultaneous eye movement and EEG recordings to investigate neural bases. His studies encompass reading in diverse writing systems such as Arabic, Chinese, English, and Mongolian. He has received the Haihe Friendship Award in 2020 for contributions to research on reading in Chinese, a Mid-Career Fellowship from the British Academy in 2012 to study ageing effects on eye movements in reading, and is a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society and a Member of the Experimental Psychology Society. Key publications include 'Aging and the Control of Binocular Fixations during Reading' (Psychology and Aging, 2013), 'Filtered text reveals adult age differences in reading: Evidence from eye movements' (Psychology and Aging, 2013), 'Eye movements during reading and noisy-channel inference-making' (Journal of Memory and Language, 2024), 'Flexible parafoveal processing of character order is preserved in older readers' (Psychology and Aging, 2025), and 'Unpacking word segmentation processes by L2 Chinese readers: Evidence from eye movements' (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2026). His research has advanced insights into reading processes and cognitive ageing.