Cognitive Processes: Historical Perspective

Introduction

Cognitive processes range from the most basic (such as simple reaction time, choice reaction time, letter comparisons, and so on) to the most complex forms of human cognition (such as planning, attention, reasoning, and memory). Numerous attempts have been made to operationalize measurement of cognitive processes – indeed, process measures are prominent among the individual scales of most omnibus intellectual ability tests. However, the identification of individual differences in specific cognitive processes has been fraught with difficulties, due to two major factors. The first factor is that tests of cognitive processes tend to be correlated with one another. The second factor is that the content of the test items also determines individual differences in test performance, sometimes to a much greater degree than the underlying ...