Cognition, Theories of

As early as the 1950s, cognitive theory was proposed by early psychologists such as J. P. Guilford, who described cognition as the awareness of objects, qualities, and ideas. Jean Piaget's thoughts on cognition depicted the [Page 160]evolutionary and developmental processes that spanned from the first sensory-motor reactions through the formation of reflective thought. Piaget held that the behavior of the human organism begins with organization of sensory-motor reactions and increases in intelligence as coordination between reactions to objects becomes progressively more interrelated and complex. His first stage of cognitive development, the sensorimotor stage, involves the coordination of sense impressions and movements. During this stage, relationships between experience and action are established. At the first step of the stage, actions are focused on sensible organization of the perceptual field. During the second step, habits, or fixed ways of responding, are developed; the transition between basic habit and intelligence is completed during the third step, after vision and apprehension are coordinated. Piaget's second stage, of concrete operations, involves the reflective grouping of objects in steps of (a) preconceptual symbolic thought established; (b) perception of unanalyzable wholes equals reality (intuitive); and (c) attainment of concrete operations, or the ability to think while manipulating objects and symbols. The third stage of conceptual thought, formal operations, involves the completion of reflective intelligences and formal thought, including causal reasoning.

By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, an emerging psychology of human cognition focused on mental structures and processes underlying both simple and complex performance. The study of individual differences focused on attained knowledge as well as cognitive processes that related to instruction, practice, and learning.

Research into the 1970s and 1980s focused on cognitive analysis of aptitude and intelligence and led to two complementary approaches to studying individual differences in cognitive ability: the cognitive correlates approach and the cognitive components approach. The cognitive correlates approach is best exemplified by Joseph McVicker Hunt and consisted of assessing relationships between performances on psychometric ability tests using standard laboratory informationprocessing tasks. The cognitive components approach sought to understand the components of performance underlying individuals'selection of items used to assess intelligence and aptitude. The componential approach has been useful in modeling performance in domains such as spatial transformation domains that are process based rather than knowledge based.

By the 1990s, cognitive psychology and the study of individual differences had evolved and provided analyses of competence and expertise. These works include the metacognitive monitoring of A. L. Brown and A. S. Palinscar, self-explanation, and text comprehension.

More recent work has been instrumental in the field's use of criteria such as consequences, fairness, transfer and generalizability, cognitive complexity, content quality, content coverage, and meaningfulness and efficiency in assessing cognition and learning. In this work, six categories of cognitive demands were identified: use of working memory, use of language and communication, metacognitive skills, application of prior knowledge and expectation, acquisition of new knowledge, and use of scientific process. In other works, cognitive activities were derived and included problem representation, monitoring, strategy, and explanation. In 1993, John Anderson described a threestage process of cognitive skill acquisition involving structures and processes in working, declarative, and procedural memory.

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