Patricia A. Carpenter is a psychologist who, as of 1997, held the Lee and Marge Gregg Professorship of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Carpenter has studied individual variability in working memory, comprehension rates in speed reading, and how brain function during complex cognitive tasks appears in functional magnetic resonance imaging. With Marcel Just, she coauthored The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension (1987).
Carpenter earned her Ph.D. in 1972 from Stanford University, and on earning her doctorate joined the Carnegie Mellon University faculty.