Peng Danling

Introduction

Peng Danling (彭聃龄, 1935–2026) shaped Chinese psychology twice over: through the textbook most of its students learned from, and through the research program he founded. A Beijing Normal University man for sixty-eight years — graduating from its education department in 1958 and joining the faculty the same year — he edited General Psychology (《普通心理学》), first published in 1988 and now in its sixth edition, the single dominant psychology textbook in China and the standard reference for the national graduate entrance examination. His own research did for Chinese what few programs attempted anywhere: the cognitive science of reading a non-alphabetic script, from eye-movement studies of Chinese reading to models of character and word recognition, and among the country's earliest brain-imaging experiments. He is counted a founding figure of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics in China, and of the cognitive neuroscience program at BNU's State Key Laboratory.

Early Life and Education

Peng was born in 1935 in Changsha, Hunan. He graduated from the education major of Beijing Normal University's education department in 1958 and joined its faculty immediately — his entire career, nearly seven decades, at one institution.

Academic and Professional Career

He led BNU's psychology department (from 1986) through the years in which it became one of the country's two flagship programs, and was a professor in the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning. He served as a standing council member of the Chinese Psychological Society and worked in its experimental and general psychology committees. He died on May 4, 2026, in Singapore, at ninety-one; the obituary from BNU's School of Psychology called the loss, in words echoed across Chinese psychology societies, a great one for psychology and brain science in China.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The textbook

General Psychology (1988; revised editions through the sixth) organized the discipline for Chinese classrooms the way the great American survey texts had for theirs — comprehensive, careful, and continuously updated as cognitive science remade the field. Several generations of Chinese psychologists met the discipline through this book before they met any other.

The reading mind

His laboratory's program on Chinese language cognition asked how readers actually process characters and words: eye-movement records of Chinese reading, lexical access and phonology in a script whose mapping from form to sound is opaque, and — with the arrival of imaging — some of the first fMRI studies conducted in China. The work founded a thriving Chinese cognitive psychology of language and connected it to the international literature on reading and the brain.