On the Organization and Core Concepts of Learning Theory and Cognitive Psychology

In the Foreword to the first volume of this Handbook, we raised the question of whether it is "possible at present to identify a core cluster of theoretical ideas, concepts, and methods with which everyone working in the area of learning and cognition needs to be familiar ... to make explicit the relationships that we feel do or must exist among the various sUbspecialties, ranging from conditioning through perceptual learning and memory to psycholinguistics" (p. ix) in a way that might help both investigators of learning and cognition and interested outsiders to relate particular lines of research to the broader spectrum of activity.