Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the basic issues, and the primary axioms and hypotheses on which the work is based. It presents evidence of the effects of cognitive task demand characteristics on the malleability and mutability of visual and verbal representations across the adult life span. The book deals with spatial cognition and with the nonspatial realm. It demonstrates a functional continuum linking the visual and verbal representational realms. The book also demonstrates that this continuum exists across stimulus types predominantly as a function of the degree to which feature-intensive or more "Gestalt" processing is emphasized by a given set of task demands or experimental framework. It shows that human understanding of the negative consequences of bad decisions may be significantly and systematically improved by the breaking down of yet another "wall".