This report describes several of the design decisions underlying ACT, a production system model of human cognition. ACT can be considered a high level computer programming language as well as a theory of the cognitive mechanisms underlying human information processing. ACT design decisions were based on both psychological and artificial…

This paper presents a system for describing and categorizing various theories of language and thinking. Within this system, theories are described in terms of their position on three basic issues: (1) the direction of dependency between language and cognition, (2) the necessity of that dependency, and (3) the level of specificity at which the…

A major contribution of information-processing theory to the psychology of remembering is the concept of memory or information retrieval. Several theories of the fact retrieval processes of the human memory, which constitute a substrate for any cognitive ability requiring stored information, have drawn heavily on certain data processing…

An assumptive, theoretical, and empirical foundation for the development of a formal dissemination model to apply to the introduction of information about educational accountability programs is set forth. If a dissemination model is to be effective, the fundamental assumptions underlying it must be spelled out explicitly. Existing communication…

This report describes research conducted regarding the development of a precise scientific language called the "Set-Function" Language (SFL) which was formulated in terms of sets and functions. The SFL retains many of the basic aspects of cognitive formulations but also provides more rigor than most of the other scientific languages. The SFL…

In this paper the author examines the "encoding-decoding" model of speaking and understanding English. He reviews in detail an objection to the model: that it was specifically designed with a view to incorporating linguistic theories, such as syntax, into it. As a result, what it more or or less accurately represents is the relation…

Section I of this report discusses the theoretical issues relating to the development of syntax recognition routines based on psychological models of human speech recognition and reviews the relevant psychological literature. The research reported deals with attempts to relate various syntactic variables to measures of the perceptual complexity of…

The building block theory of language structure, an information processing approach, is applied to the development of a model of the reading process. Specifically, the model is concerned with the amount of time an individual will spend reading and the amount of content he will decode which is determined by a series of cognitive processes involving…

In this essay, research done on concept learning is discussed. The study analyzes concept learning as one form of learning, formulating guidelines for teaching concepts, and describes the abilities underlying the attainment of concepts. An analytical model is presented; various operations such as concrete concepts and identity concepts are…

The lack of a universal definition of creativity has led to the assessment of creativity according to the definition favored by the evaluator. These assessments fall into four groups. The first centers around the concept of the creative product; it assesses a tangible event or relationship that results from the creative process, which is implied…

The experiments discussed in this report do not have a direct relationship to each other but represent work on a series of sub-issues within the general framework of visual processing of information. Because of this discreteness, the report is organized into a series of papers. The first is a general review of tachistoscopic work on iconic memory…

Three approaches to teaching university-level creative problem-solving skills are described. (BD)

The contrasting approaches of differential psychology and cognitive psychology to the same individual differences data are outlined. Using data from the Clark and Chase sentence-picture verification task, four loci of conflict between these two disciplines are identified: (1) theory versus measurement; (2) meaningfulness versus reliability; (3)…

Argues for the importance of combining the concerns of the functionalist (Dewey, 1910) approach to memory with investigations of the effects of context and task demands. Two experiments are reported that demonstrate interactions between task demands and the more traditional functionalist variables. Particularly demonstrates that the effects of…

A series of experiments was reported in which three models of word identification were evaluated: the direct-semantic-access model, the visual-features stage model, and the phonemic-recoding stage model. A modified Stroop task was used to contrast these three models. (Editor/RK)