ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with particular cognitive skills and reviews the basic nature and function of the unit task and the determinants of unit task structure in more fundamental psychological factors. It considers several aspects of unit tasks: their well-defined internal structure, their basic function as a control construct for the user, their characteristic durations, and their relationship to problem solving. The chapter also considers the tasks and their associated cognitive skills at a generic level. It examines the general nature of cognitive skill in a broader psychological framework. Human behaviors tend to get labeled—as problem solving, skill, learning, imagining, creating, day-dreaming. Problem-solving behavior will, with practice, become cognitive skill. The important aspect of the law is that it applies uniformly to all types of cognitive behavior, so long as the behavior is sufficiently well organized to attain the task. Complex and extended cognitive behavior is organized hierarchically into many levels.
