ABSTRACT
Philosophy.—According to a long-standing and widespread conception of how the mind works (→MIND), humans are endowed with a set of general reasoning abilities that are called upon in all cognitive tasks, irrespective of their content (→COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT, REASONING AND RATIONALITY). A competing view contends that on the contrary, there are many cognitive capacities, each specialized in the processing of certain types of information (→INFORMATION), and that every domain of knowledge has its own specific principles that dictate its organization and structure. A domain, then, can be defined as a body of knowledge that enables one to identify and interpret a set of phenomena assumed to share certain properties and to form a general type (→INTERPRETATION); this knowledge serves as a guide when tasks involving perception, encoding, memorization, or reasoning are being performed on that class of phenomena (→MEMORY, PERCEPTION).
