ABSTRACT
During the Behaviorist epoch in psychology there was a prejudice against any sort of theorizing that imputed an elaborated structure to the processes that generate animal and human behavior. It was felt that such theorizing risked returning the science of behavioral analysis to some sort of prescientific mentalism. A welcome gust of fresh thinking swept into psychology when the cognitive approach supplanted the stimulus-response approach. The tendency to conceptualize perceptual and mnemonic processes by analogy to computerized information processing allowed one to talk about the structure of internal processes in a way that sounded sufficiently hardheaded. On the other hand, the dominance of the information processing viewpoint made the problem of action recede into the background. Computers are symbol manipulating machines. They take symbols as inputs and produce symbols as outputs. The structure of overt computer action bears little if any interesting resemblance to the structure of animal action. Hence, in modern psychology “theories of perception abound, [while] theories of action are conspicuous by their absence” (Turvey, 1977, p. 211).
