First Things Fast: A Handbook for Performance Analysis, Second Edition

10.5. Dueling Views of Cognition

Although all practitioners can name the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, it is much harder to get a handle on the cognitivists. As Rita Richey (1986) of Wayne State University points out, cognitivists talk about many things: the readiness of the learner; organization of knowledge, most particularly mental models, or schemata, that people construct to represent what they know; insight; the relationship between computers and intelligence; short-term memory and strategies for ensuring storage and retrieval in long-term memory; individual perspectives on the material or job; and creating meaning by attaching new material to what is already familiar and useful. To all this John Keller (1983) of Florida State added the issue ...